Six graduating Chemistry students honored for scholarship, research, teaching, and departmental citizenship

Noah Gibson has been a wonderful member of the Yale Chemistry community through his exceptional science, his teaching, his outreach and mentoring, and especially through his service. 

Gibson is a member of Professor James Mayer’s lab, where he developed an impactful research program. His primary project has developed the reaction chemistry of colloidal tungsten trioxide nanorods. Using a quantitative, physical-organic approach, he has shown the importance of non-ideal thermochemistry for adsorbates at the oxide/solution interface—a broadly important topic. Gibson has shown that the unusual exponential dependence of rate constants on surface coverage follows directly from the thermochemistry. Most recently, he has developed iterative kinetic models that numerically connect the kinetics and non-ideal thermochemistry. These could have valuable applications across interfacial and surface-reactivity problems in catalysis, electrochemistry, and materials chemistry.

During his time at Yale, Gibson displayed outstanding citizenship in and outside the department. As president of the Joint Safety Committee for five years, he led a successful effort to broadly improve safety culture. For the past three summers, he has taught multi-day chemistry workshops to local children, and he has mentored student interns as part of a 7-week summer research program through Yale Pathways. He has been a primary mentor for a Yale undergraduate researcher, a summer high school research intern, and multiple new graduate students and postdocs. He has also volunteered for the Yale Chemistry Symposium and Visiting Days. For his excellence in teaching, he received the T.F. Cooke Teaching Award in 2022.

Prior to Yale, Gibson earned a B.Sc. in chemistry from Auburn University. Gibson has accepted a position as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago.

Richard Wolfgang Prizes

Awarded to chemistry graduate students with a record of outstanding academic work

Abhijit Rana

Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry
Thesis Defense: Water-Mediated Proton Transfer in Microhydrated 4-Aminobenzoic Acid: Structural Characterization and Microcanonical Kinetics Using Cryogenic Ion Spectroscopy

Abhijit Rana was a member of Professor Mark Johnson’s lab, where he developed a new experiential method to study chemical reactions at the nanoscale by combining cryogenic mass spectrometry with laser spectroscopy. He then exploited this capability to reveal how a handful of water molecules act in concert to enable the transport of positive electric charge through water.

Rana began his research by applying methods previously developed in the Johnson Lab to measure reaction kinetics that occur when reactants are confined to size-selected water clusters as a function of temperature. He then applied the method to follow the temperature dependence of one of the most important processes in aqueous chemistry: the water network-mediated migration of “excess” protons. He established that the temperature-dependent approach fails for proton-transfer systems because thermodynamics produces broad internal energy distributions in small systems at a defined temperature. Consequently, midway through his Ph.D. work, he fundamentally redesigned the experimental approach and implemented it with reconfigured instrumentation. This involved first freezing the target clusters close to 0 Kelvin and then selectively injecting reactants and products with resonant infrared photoexcitation to trigger the reactions in the so-called “micro-canonical” limit. These successful measurements are reported in first-author papers in Science and JACS.

This work provides benchmark measurements of water-mediated proton transport in highly controlled, isolated systems, creating a reliable reference point for both experimental and theoretical validation. These results offer unique insight for understanding analogous proton-transfer processes in more complex condensed-phase environments.

After graduation, Rana will begin a postdoctoral researcher position at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Nicolò Tampellini

Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry
Thesis Defense: On Atomistic Modeling and Asymmetric Catalysis: Stereocontrolled Synthesis by Design

Nicolò Tampellini was a member of Professor Scott Miller’s lab, where he made outstanding contributions to the study of asymmetric catalytic reactions. Specifically, he developed new catalysts for a very broad set of reactions, addressing numerous types of stereochemically complex situations. Throughout his Ph.D. work, his discoveries bridged experiments, computations, and theoretical issues. These findings could be relevant to the synthesis of pharmaceuticals.

Tampellini’s research in the Miller Lab set the stage for an epic dissertation. In one study, Nick developed and mechanistically characterized a new asymmetric catalyst to control axial chirality in a pharmaceutically relevant atropisomer, revealing a new noncovalent interaction that helps drive selectivity. In another study, he helped elucidate the mechanism of a newly discovered stereoselective process from the Miller Lab and clarified the basis of its selectivity. In still another project, he completed a tour de force in asymmetric catalysis, physical organic chemistry, and synthesis, developing a single catalyst that selectively produces individual enantiomers of inherently chiral 7‑ and 8‑membered rings; structures where chirality arises from ring conformation rather than from carbon-based stereocenters or chiral axes. The catalyst carries out enantioselective ring formation in 7‑membered rings via SNAr chemistry and 8‑membered rings via SN2 reactions. In yet another study, he developed a new set of peptide-based catalysts for the enantioselective synthesis of sulfenamides. Remarkably, he also used DFT-based calculations to guide the discovery and optimization of a peptide-based catalyst for an entirely new enantioselective reaction.

Given that his work is highly original and published in high-impact, general-interest chemistry journals, other scientists will likely benefit from his process for catalyst design.

Tampellini has just begun postdoctoral studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Graduating Undergraduate Student Prizes

Arthur Fleischer Prize

Awarded to undergraduate students for their outstanding performance in chemistry

Madeleine Popofsky

Bachelor of Science Intensive in Chemistry

Madeleine Popofsky is to be commended for her impressive academic performance, achieving an outstanding grade-point average despite engaging in a rigorous and diverse course curriculum. She conducted research in Professor Amymarie Bartholomew’s laboratory, where she contributed to the synthesis of anthracene dimers with applications in photopatternable materials. 

She was dedicated, always putting in more hours than required, and developed her own synthetic plans based on extensive literature searches and a strong understanding of synthetic chemistry fundamentals. A true pleasure to have in the Bartholomew group, she has made valuable contributions to the research program. She appears on one published JACS paper and one forthcoming paper from the group as a co-author. 

Additionally, Popofsky has helped students in the Chemistry Department through her service as a peer tutor and peer mentor. She will pursue a graduate degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

Howard Douglass Moore ‘33S Prize

Awarded to a student for excellence in the field of chemistry

Natsume Wu

Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

Natsume Wu is to be commended for her outstanding academic performance, achieving a perfect grade-point average despite engaging in a rigorous and diverse course curriculum. She conducted research under the supervision of Professor Tianyu Zhu. Wu contributed to computational simulations of X-ray spectroscopy and atomic-scale imperfections in diamonds, which have applications in quantum sensing. As an outstanding student—one of the top students in Chem 252—she is recognized for her excellent academic performance. Her research was partly supported by the Rosenfeld Science Scholarship. She has also contributed to the Chemistry Department through her service as a peer tutor. 

Werner Bergmann Prize

Awarded to the outstanding senior in the Chemistry Department

Simon Britton

Bachelor of Science Intensive in Chemistry