Dr. Allison Smith has been awarded an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship! 

This prestigious fellowship will give Allison up to 3 years of funding to pursue her research ideas related to CO2-based polymers and sustainability. You can read more in the news release from the AOB Foundation here.

Allison is the 2nd Beckman Fellow ever hosted at the University of Minnesota. She joins a strong cohort of postdocs from the Tonks Group who have won prestigious fellowships, including the NIH F32 and NSERC PDF fellowships.

Ian has been awarded the 2026 George W. Taylor Award for Distinguished Research from the UMN College of Science and Engineering! Ian continues the strong performance of the Department of Chemistry: he is the 10th awardee from Chemistry since the award's inception in 1982.

Alison Duckworth wins 'Outstanding Poster Award - 1st Place' at the Chicago Regional Inorganic Colloquium (CRIC) held at the University of Minnesota. 

She seems delighted with her new rock.   

Both Madhur and Arron attended the ACS Fall conference in Washington DC

Madhur gave an oral presentation titled 'Ureate anion-catalyzed ring opening polymerization of CO2-derived lactones: rapid catalysis through pKa matching'

Arron gave a poster presentation titled 'Contra-thermodynamic a,b- to b,y- photodeconjugation of an inert CO2/butadiene lactone for facile Ring Opening Polymerization'

Morale remains high in the Tonks group despite the Twins losing 8-5 to the Red Sox

A busy month of June with two new PhD graduates!

Congratulations to both Dr Ryan Anderson and Dr Rachel Dunscomb for successfully defending!  

Wild River State Park

Ryan, Arron and Madhur attend the Industrial Partnership for Research in Interfacial Materials Engineering (IPRIME) annual meeting where they heard the lastest Polymer Research Minnesota has to offer. 

Partha is undertaking a 3-month intership at W. R. Grace where he will be designing and optimizing synthetic strategies for group 4 metallocene-based polymerization catalysts. 

Congratulations to Alison Duckworth and Madhur Bhatt on successfully passing your OPE!

The Tonks Group has 2 new reports out on catalytic reactions with Ti, both "firsts" of their kind! First, Kate reports on a new cascading "interrupted" hydroamination reaction; and second, Steven reveals a unique example of transfer-hydrogenation coupled nitrene transfer!

It was a busy month in the Tonks group with 2 freshly-minted PhDs! Congrats to Dr. Kate Rynders and Dr. Rachel Rapgnani, who both defended in August! Kate is off to a career in patent law and Rachel has moved down the road to work as a scientist at HB Fuller. Congrats both!

Ian was invited to present at IACS in Kolkata on 11 July and also at the 'Emerging Trends in Organometallics and Catalysis' at IISER Kolkata 12-13 July.

Ian is also presenting at the 30th International Conference on Organometallic Chemistry held in Agra, India 14-18 July.

The start of the summer term has brought four new researchers to the Tonks Lab: Alex Cartolano has joined as a "zero-year" PhD student; Ollie Clarke and Audrey Surdell have joined as NSF CSP Summer Undergraduates, and Alex Sell has joined as an NSF-REU/LANDO Summer Undergraduate! Ollie will be working with Arron and Rachel R; Audrey with Ryan and Madhur; and Alex S with Partha and Jaekwan. It's a busy time in the lab!

Yukun's study revising the mechanism of N-N coupling with Ti has been published in Dalton Transactions! This is Yukun's 9th paper with the Tonks Group--will there be more??

Our studies into using solid-state 15N NMR to predict M=NR reactivity, in collaboration with the Copéret Group at ETH, has been published in JACS! Partha led the UMN side of this collaboration, synthesizing a variety of 15N-labelled metal imido complexes.

Welcome to our latest visiting student Takuya Akiyama from the Mashima Group in Osaka University. We hope you will enjoy your time here working on polymerization catalysis 

The group has published a new Chem. Rev. summarizing their work on CO2-derived lactone polymerization.

The group has published a new Inorg. Chem. paper, demonstrating the advantages of using W to catalyze our [2+2+1] pyrrole reaction. This project was led by our collaborators in Osaka, Kazushi Mashima and Hayato Tsurugi, with first author Takuya Akiyama--who will be joining the Tonks Group for a research stay this summer!

Ian, Arron, and Rachel R spent 2.5 weeks in Sydney and Melbourne as part of the NSF CSP and CSIRO sponsored PELICANS program, where we learned about recycling and the circular economy around plastic packaging in Australia.

Congratulations Zoe Fish for passing your OPE! Officially a PhD Candidate!

Congratulations to Dr. Shao-Yu Lo on passing his viva examination 

Welcome to our newest PhD recruits Alison, Madhur and Aiswarya on joining the team!

Well done to Janaya and Ryan on their latest work published in ACS Catal. on hydroesterificative polymerization of 10-Undecen-1-ol