The Department of Chemistry welcomed its newest cohort of graduate students at the annual Yale Chemistry Symposium on August 22.
'A knight’s chess move': Chemistry alum shares innovation game plan with incoming students
Photo by Charlyn Paradis.
Some students enter the chemistry Ph.D. program with a dream of creating a new compound. Others hope they might discover a novel way to transform one chemical into another. One thing is for sure. They will create new knowledge. And they might even be fortunate enough to make a tool that becomes commercially relevant.
That is the reality Conor Rooney ’24 Ph.D. created during his time at Yale. He recently returned to campus to talk about his Ph.D. research and carbon conversion startup company as the keynote speaker of the Yale Chemistry Symposium.
Conor Rooney ‘24 Ph.D. (Photo by Charlyn Paradis)
Looking at the audience of fresh faces, he recalled a piece of advice he received. “One lesson Bob Crabtree gave us in the inorganic chemistry class in my first year as a Ph.D. student was to always make a knight’s chess move in your research,” said Rooney, co-founder and chief technical officer of Oxylus Energy. “Never do the obvious next step.”
“In the fourth year of my Ph.D., I really had no idea what to do next. I hadn’t spent a lot of time outside the lab.”
“My roommate had mentioned there was a center for entrepreneurship. So, I decided to check it out and signed up for a climate-intensive short course.” During this course, Rooney connected with management students.
As his vision for commercializing green methanol began to take shape, he tapped into other resources—learning from alumni mentors through Tsai CITY and from local entrepreneurs through ClimateHaven.
Faculty knew he was onto something big. They awarded him the highest honor a graduate can receive from the department — the Richard Wolfgang Prize — for the most significant Ph.D. thesis of the year: “Waste to Worth: Diversified Products from CO2 (carbon dioxide) and Nitrogen Oxides Electroreduction.”
After graduation, Rooney launched Oxylus Energy, a startup that commercialized a system he developed in Professor Hailiang Wang’s lab at the Yale Energy Sciences Institute. Through a process that converts CO2 waste into methanol liquid fuel, the company offers a clean alternative to traditional methanol, one that doesn’t emit more of the harmful CO2 gas linked to climate change. They aim to market their green fuel to big producers of CO2 — the aviation and shipping industries.
“Getting the snowball rolling down the hill on this business would have been a lot harder to push if it weren’t for Yale,” said Rooney. “It’s important to take advantage of some of the resources here.”
Every aspect of the day-long symposium reflected the department’s commitment to student success.
In the morning, the new first years attended an orientation of the Ph.D. program, library resources, and research cores. In the afternoon, they joined the entire department in a large lecture hall to watch research presentations, a safety talk, a community recognition talk, and an awards ceremony.
Photo by Charlyn Paradis.
Professor and Chair Nilay Hazari welcomed the first-year students and acknowledged staff contributions to the department.
The Director of Graduate Studies, Hailiang Wang, announced Natalia Bertolotti, Andrew Champlin, Pen Chang, Kristian Olesen, and Sadie Wolfarth as the recipients of the T. F. Cooke Awards, recognizing their excellence as teaching assistants.
Professor James Mayer and Chemistry’s Environmental Health & Services Safety Officer Paul Emery — both members of the department’s Safety Committee — emphasized the importance of following safety procedures and plugged the upcoming Safety Day training.
In addition to the keynote speaker, eight graduate students presented research from their labs, each representing one of the seven chemistry research areas the new students will choose to study. Topics ranged from virus RNA structures to quantum machine learning for molecular design.
For a more comprehensive look at chemistry research, the audience moved into the historic hallway of the Sterling Chemistry Lab, where 38 posters and presenters stood ready to share the latest findings from their research groups.
Photo by Charlyn Paradis.
Yale alumni who also work at Oxylus Energy include Chemistry graduates Anthony Deziel, Bo Shang, and Eleanor Stewart-Jones, as well as former Chemistry postdoctoral researcher Jose Alvarez Hernandez, and School of Management graduates Perry Bakas, Ray Mattioli, and Harrison Meyer.
A special thanks to the event organizers who made YCS a success: staff Lisa Hines, Ed Ginter, Bucket Borrego, Kara Swenson, and Maggie Simonsen; and the entire 2nd-year class volunteers, including co-chairs Kendal Southwell and Jerry Xu.
More remarkable science from symposium speakers
Zach Boyer
Zach Boyer, a 3rd-year graduate student from Professor Jon Ellman’s lab, presented research on the asymmetric synthesis of sulfoximines — specifically S-Methyl and S-Cyclopropyl sulfoximines — which are the substitution patterns found in all sulfoximine-containing clinical drug candidates. These structures are increasingly used in medicinal chemistry due to their favorable pharmacokinetic properties and potential to enhance compound potency and selectivity. Previously, there was no efficient and highly enantioenriched method for synthesizing these sulfoximines. The lab’s work is the first to achieve this.
Michael Burke
Michael Burke, a 6th-year graduate student from Professor Caitlin Davis’s lab and Professor Victor Batista’s group, presented his research on “Label-Free AI-Classification of Subcellular Organelles Based on Optical Photothermal Infrared Images.”
Teddy Gerard
Teddy Gerard, a 4th-year graduate student, represented inorganic chemistry from Professor Patrick Holland’s lab. He presented his research on developing synthetic models of the active site of carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH), an enzyme that efficiently interconverts CO2 and CO. Studying these models helps researchers understand the structure and function of the enzyme active site, which could lead to a better understanding of how nature regulates atmospheric carbon.
Olivia Langner
Olivia Langner, a 5th-year graduate student, represented organic chemistry from Professor Scott Miller’s lab. She presented her research on site-selective oxidation of macrolide antibiotics, specifically how the different oxidation conditions lead to orthogonal reactivity on related scaffolds. These findings have enabled the generation of a suite of novel antibiotic derivatives, some of which have exhibited activity against antibiotic-resistant strains of S. aureus.”
Devi Oniani
Devi Oniani, a 4th-year graduate student from Professor Nilay Hazari’s group, presented his research on “Ni/Ti Dual Catalyzed Cross-Electrophile Coupling between Unactivated Alkyl Chlorides and Aryl Halides.” The research aimed to broaden the scope of cross-electrophile coupling reactions to include difficult-to-activate alkyl chlorides by using a titanium catalyst alongside the traditional nickel catalyst. This work demonstrates the versatility of dual-catalytic systems and the potential of cocatalysts to enable previously challenging reactions.
Abhijit Rana
Abhijit Rana, a 5th-year graduate student, represented physical chemistry from Professor Mark Johnson’s lab. He presented their research on the kinetics of proton transfer in size-selected charged water-cluster complexes, focusing on how the proton migrates through a network of six water molecules surrounding a protonated 4-aminobenzoic acid scaffold. These findings could lead to new ways to benchmark theoretical models of aqueous proton conduction and ultimately guide the design of more efficient proton-exchange systems for energy conversion, catalysis, and biomimetic chemistry.
Lucille Tsao
Lucille Tsao, a 5th-year graduate student, represented research in nucleic acid chemistry from Professor Anna Marie Pyle’s lab. She presented her research on characterizing the RNA structures within the West Nile Virus (WNV) genome. Her work showed that individual structural motifs within WNV work synergistically to aid in viral growth. These findings provide a better understanding of how viral RNA structures influence the viral lifecycle and could serve as a model for discovering novel therapeutic functional motifs to treat WNV and related viruses.
Yue (Samuel) Yu
Yue Yu, a fourth-year graduate student in Professor Victor Batista’s group, showcased new methods in quantum machine learning for molecular design. He introduced a fully quantum variational autoencoder capable of generating novel molecular structures, together with practical techniques for running the model on quantum hardware and mitigating computational errors. The work highlights emerging opportunities at the intersection of quantum computing and AI in chemistry, biology, and medicine.
