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Shauna Paradine Receives NSF CAREER Award

Congratulations to Shauna Paradine, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, for being a recipient of the 2023 Faculty Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF)! Her proposal was titled “Establishing Ligand Platforms to Enable Selective, Catalytic Olefin Difunctionalization Reactions for Constructing Diverse Heterocyclic Scaffolds.”

Dr. Paradine and coworkers plan to develop novel catalytic strategies for the synthesis of diverse heterocycles (cyclic compounds with nitrogen or oxygen atoms in them). Using both mechanistically-guided and data-driven ligand design approaches, this work will establish ligand platforms that occupy underexplored regions of ligand space for palladium, enabling the discovery of new reactivity and ligand control over reaction outcomes in heteroannulation reactions. The reaction products that can be made through the proposed work represent core structures of small molecules that are relevant for the development of new therapeutics, agrochemicals, and materials. Additionally, the ligand platforms developed through this work have the potential to be applied in late transition metal catalysis more broadly.

Dr. Paradine will also establish a formal course in scientific communication meant for both undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry. This course is intended to equip students with broad communication skills in diverse media, including an emphasis on accessibility in scientific communication.

Dr. Paradine received her BA in chemistry from Albion College, where she performed research under the guidance of Dr. Andrew French. She then moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she pursued her PhD studies in chemistry with Professor M. Christina White. Shauna’s PhD research centered on the development of new catalytic strategies for C-H amination reactions with first-row transition metal catalysts. In 2015, she joined Professor Eric Jacobsen’s group at Harvard University as an NIH postdoctoral fellow, where she developed enantioselective, multicomponent allylation reactions using hydrogen bond donor catalysis. She joined the chemistry faculty at University of Rochester in 2018.

The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide program that offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations. Such support is expected to help build a firm foundation for a lifetime of faculty leadership in integrating education and research.