Gwendolyn A. Bailey

Raised in the Rocky Mountains, British Columbia, Gwen first discovered her interest in synthetic chemistry during co-op research positions at Arbutus Biopharma (Burnaby, BC), Xerox Research Center of Canada (Mississauga, ON) and in Prof. Chris Orvig's medicinal inorganic chemistry lab at the University of British Columbia. There, she synthesized multidentate copper, indium, and gallium complexes for radiopharmaceutical applications. From there, she moved across the country to Canada's bilingual university, University of Ottawa, to study productive and unproductive pathways accessible to the highly active second-generation Ru catalysts for olefin metathesis with Prof. Deryn Fogg. There, she also had the opportunity and pleasure of teaching synthetic and physical chemistry labs in both French and English, and skating the length of the Rideau Canal. 

After graduating with a Ph.D. with Prof. Fogg in 2018, Gwen moved to Pasadena, CA as an NSERC and Resnick Sustainability Institute postdoctoral fellow with Prof. Theodor Agapie at Caltech. There, she fell in love with the sunshine and grew her first tomato garden, besides studying rare and reactive, terminal carbide complexes for C–C coupling from abundant feedstocks, and synthesizing molecular mimics of the metallocofactor of nitrogenase, an N2-fixing enzyme. 

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