News
Lab Olympics: The lab competed in a series of 5 events (estimation of NaCl weight by eye, estimation of H2O weight by eye, precise TLC plate cutting, Schiff base formation, and RAFT polymerization) to crown a Zhukhovitskiy Group Chemistry Champion. The 2024 winner: [recently minted Dr.] Ben Kruse
12.06.24
A big congratulations to undergraduate researcher Daniel Godfrey who was just honored with James H. Maguire Memorial Award which recognizes an outstanding junior-year chemistry major.
11.04.24
We’d like to celebrate Ben Kruse for graduating with his Ph.D.! The lab will surely miss Ben’s synthetic mind and stellar personality. We are so proud of Dr. Kruse’s work on templated entanglements!
10.31.24
Congratulations to Sydney Towell on making the Three-Minute Thesis competition finals! Check out her presentation here!
10.22.24
Enjoy our latest on backbone editing of oxidized polyethylene here! Congratulations to Andrew King on this publication!
10.21.24
Take a look at this interesting article about issues with a plastic waste management facility, featuring Alex as an author!
We’re excited to announce the group’s latest on templated entanglements! A big congrats to Erin Krist and Ben Kruse on this publication in Macromolecules. Check it out here!
08.07.24
The group would like to welcome Post-Doc Dr. Li Ji to Chapel Hill! We are excited to learn from her expertise in polymerization catalysis!
o7.24.24
A shout out to Drake Johnson, Andrew King
, and
Fu-Sheng Wang for their most recent publication in Organometallics!
Enjoy this nice read on Six-Membered Iridacycles!
07.01.24
Be sure to take a look at our newest review article on Trapped Entanglements in Trends In Chemistry! Congrats to graduate students Leah Kosovsky, Erin Krist, and Ben Kruse, as well as Post-doc FuSheng Wang!
06.22.24
Check out our work in collaboration with the Tonks Group on Architectural Editing in JACS! Congratulations to many students in the group: Rachael Ditzler, Nate Berney, Erin Krist
,
Ben Kruse, and
Hilary Fokwa!
05.22.24
Hot off the press is our work on templated entanglements in Macromolecules! Congratulations to postdoc Fu-Sheng Wang and graduate student Ben Kruse!
05.03.24
We’d like to celebrate Drake Johnson for graduating with his Ph.D.! We surely will miss Drake’s excellent mentorship of many in the lab, and are extremely proud of his accomplishments in heteroatom metathesis polymerization! Dr. Johnson will be continuing his Chemistry career at Luna Labs come this summer!
04.16.24
Congratulations to Andrew King on receiving his Ph.D.! The freshly minted Dr. King is headed to Princeton University this summer for postdoctoral research with the Chirik group, more in tune with his inorganic chemistry roots. We are so incredibly proud of his work advancing the understanding of dinuclear metal catalysts for conjugated polymer synthesis!
04.15.24
Congratulations to Rachael Ditzler, our very first Ph.D.! We are very proud of her trailblazing work on the editing of polymer backbones via [3,3]-Sigmatropic rearrangements! Dr. Ditzler will be joining P&G this summer!
03.27.24
See this awesome Chemistry World opinion piece on backbone editing featuring Alex!
Check out this Chemistry World article featuring our lab’s work on backbone editing!
Congrats to Andrew King on winning the Francis Preston Venable award for exemplary research, Killian Family Graduate Student Excellence Fund for exemplary service, and Ralph Walton Bost Fund for exemplary teaching!
12.13.23
Congrats to Drake Johnson on being awarded the Ernest L. Eliel award for outstanding mentorship, and the Thomas L. Isenhour and E.A. Booth award for outstanding research!
12.13.23
Congrats to Lauren Satkowiak on being awarded the Sanford Steelman Fund for excellence in teaching!
12.13.23
Congrats to Leah Kosovsky on being awarded the Richard G. Hiskey Graduate Fund!
12.13.23
Congrats to Drake Johnson, on publishing a perspective in ACS Catalysis on Hetero-ene Metathesis!
12.13.23
Congrats to Andrew King on publishing his work on the influence of catalyst identity for Kumada Cross-Coupling Polymerizations in ACS Polymer Au!
11.8.23
Andrew King has been selected to participate in the “2024 Excellence in Graduate Polymer Research Symposium”! Congrats Andrew!
11.1.23
Congrats to undergraduate student Elias Arroyo on receiving UNC chemistry’s Stern Award!
11.1.23
Thank you to The Guardian for highlighting our work on skeletal rearrangements of polymer backbones!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/aug/05/skeletal-editing-chemistry-molecule-atom-medicine-drug-development-sustainable
Congrats to Rachael Ditzler, Andrew King, Sydney Towell, and Maxim Ratushnyy on publishing their review article titled Editing of polymer backbones in Nature Reviews Chemistry!
8.8.2023
Congratulations to post-doc Maxim Ratushnyy, who has departed for a job at Syngenta! We will greatly miss you, Maxim!
6.12.2023
We’ll be missing Rachael Ditzler for a few months, as she has departed for her 3-month internship at Procter and Gamble. Best of luck!
6.12.2023
We’re happy to welcome undergraduate Isabella Summers to the group!
6.10.2023
It’s official - our work on carbodiimide ring-opening metathesis polymerization is out today in ACS Central Science! Congratulations to Drake Johnson and Sam Kaplan, as well as undergraduate alumnus Joey Toth and highschool student Zian Wang!
05.11.2023
Congratulations to Sam Kaplan for passing his second-year oral-exam. Excited to see what the future holds!
4/24/2023
We’re excited to announce that Sydney Towell has passed her second-year oral-exam and has been awarded the NSF GRFP! Congrats Sydney, excited to see what the future holds!
3/29/2023
We are grateful that our work on polymer backbone editing was featured in Chemistry World!
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/editing-the-structure-of-molecules/4017084.article
We’re excited to welcome undergraduate Matt Satkowiak to the group!
1.27.23
We’re excited to welcome high school student Graham Rousseau to the group!
1.23.23
Alex has received the 2023 Thieme Chemistry Journals award!
1.23.2023
Alex has been selected to receive the Air Force Office of Scientific Research’s Young Investigator Program Award (AFOSR-YIP)!
12.15.2022
Another preprint from our lab is out, this time on carbodiimide ROMP! Congratulations to graduate students Drake Johnson and Samuel Kaplan, as well as visiting high-school student Zian Wang and group alumnus Jozsef Toth!
12.14.2022
We’re excited to welcome undergraduate Chyanne McKeller to the group! We see awesome chemistry in your future!
12.14.2022
Congratulations to Rachael Ditzler, Andrew King, Sydney Towell, and Maxim Ratushnny on the preprint publication of their review of polymer backbone editing - check it out here!
12.12.22
We’re thrilled to welcome first-year graduate students Lauren Satkowiak (left) and Leah Kosovsky (right) to the group!
12.01.2022
Congratulations to Andrew King, who was awarded UNC’s departmental Eliel Fellowship - well deserved!
8.31.2022
Check out research on biodegradable COVID masks in J. Chem. Ed., featuring an idea formulated and realized by several undergraduates (Elizabeth Karlsson, Jia-Hao Hu) in Alex’s polymer lab class!
8.22.2022
Hilay Fokwa has passed her second-year oral exam - congratulations! Excited to see what the future holds!
7.22.2022
We welcome post-baccalaureate Nate Berney to the group!
7.01.2022
We’re grateful to the ACS PRF for funding our lab’s research into new polymerization chemistry!
6.10.2022
Incoming graduate student Julia Morris has joined our lab for the summer!
6.7.2022
We are thankful to the U.S. Department of Energy for funding our lab through the Early Career Research Program!
6.6.2022
Our latest publication comes from Andrew King, who worked to demystify a fascinating bimetallic polymerization mechanism. Great work, Andrew!
5.11.2022
Our lab was selected to receive a grant from the NSF! We are very grateful to the NSF CHE division for this funding!
4.27.2022
Our undergrad Elias Arroyo was awarded the Rauch-King summer research fellowship and will be joining us full-time over the summer!
04.12.2022
Congratulations to Erin Krist for passing her second-year oral exam! Keep up the good work!
04.11.2022
Our latest publication was highlighted in C&EN - take a look here! Congrats, Rachael!
12.04.2021
We welcome two first-year graduate students to the Zhuko group, Sydney Towell (left) and Samuel Kaplan (right)! Looking forward to the great work they’ll be doing!
11.24.2021
Rachael gives us something else to be thankful for this holiday season! Check out our second paper in JACS here - great work!
11.22.2021
We are grateful to the National Science Foundation for supporting our research through a CAREER grant to study trapped entanglements in polymer networks to make tougher soft materials.
11.15.2021
We’ve got two new faces in the Zhukho lab - postdoc Fu-Sheng Wang (left) and undergraduate Brittany Blitstein (right)! Check them out on the Members page.
11.08.2021
We’re thrilled to have our first paper published - check it out here in JACS! Congratulations to post-doc Maxim Ratushnyy!
10.22.2021
October is upon us again, and that means more pumpkin carving! Check out our line-up of the best pumpkins Chapel Hill has to offer (no one else had carved any yet…)!
10.20.2021
We also welcome two new faces - Kohen Goble (left), an undergraduate who will be working with us for the foreseeable future, and Zian Wang (right), an ambitious high-school student who will be getting a taste of research this summer!
7.15.2021
This summer we’re excited to be joined by incoming graduate student Yasmin Ajirniar, who is doing a “zero-year” rotation in our group!
6.10.2021
Our undergrad Joey Toth has accepted a position at Roche, and has departed our lab for some industry experience! Bittersweet, we’ll miss you Joey!
6.01.2021
Our 4th PhD candidate Ben Kruse passed his 2nd year oral exam this evening! Excited to see what the future holds!
4.22.2021
Drake Johnson has passed his 2nd year oral exam, becoming our 3rd bona fide PhD candidate! Congratulations, keep looking forward!
4.15.2021
Alex has earned the 3M Non-tenured Faculty award for early career achievements!
4.06.2021
Ben Kruse has racked up another prestigious fellowship, this time through the DoD NDSEG program! Congratulations, two-for-two!
3.30.2021
Our second PhD candidate, Andrew King, passed his 2nd year oral exam! Great job, one step closer!
3.29.2021
Rachael Ditzler passed her 2nd year oral exam, and is our first PhD candidate! Congratulations, keep up the good work!
3.26.2021
We’re thrilled to announce that two of our students have received the NSF GRFP Fellowship - Rachael Ditzler and Ben Kruse! Well deserved!
3.23.2021
Alex received the Junior Faculty Development Award!
1.12.2021
We’re thrilled to welcome three new graduate students to the Zhukhovitskiy lab - Erin Krist, Hilary Fokwa, and Joseph Collins! Looking forward to the great work they’ll do!
11.16.2020
Congratulations to our undergraduate Joey Toth, who earned the Stern Scholar award for excellence in upper-level chemistry labs! Well deserved!
10.23.2020
Halloween is imminent! We, along with our rotation students, carved up some of the best pumpkin designs of our generation! Which one is the best?
10.09.2020
We also welcome Maxim Ratushnyy to the group! Maxim joins us from UT Dallas, where he worked previously with Prof.
Vladimir Gevorgyan on synthetic methods development. He’s a polymer guy now!
6.10.2020
We welcome two new members to the group this summer! Undergraduate Joey Toth (left), who will be working with us for the foreseeable future, and incoming graduate student Joe Collins (right), who is rotating with us this summer.
6.04.2020
We all tried a bit of quarantine yoga over Zoom together to loosen up - the most physically intensive activity we could all be convinced to do. Thanks for leading us, Katrina!
5.21.2020
Congratulations to our stellar undergrad Skylar McGaughey, who just graduated with an Honors BA in Chemistry, and a minor in Spanish! She’s moving on to the UNC Adams School of Dentistry - we’ll miss her!
5.11.2020
We may have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves at the local escape room - choosing the most difficult one for our first time led to a disastrous defeat! Some of us took the loss harder than others.
3.06.2020
Our own Ben (center), and Irene (Leibfarth group, right), won the 4th annual Paper of the Year competition between the polymer groups at UNC, with this paper from MIT’s Zhao group! Travis (Leibfarth group, left) begrudgingly transfers the prized “Curios Henry: Limited Edition 1996” trophy of unknown origins.
1.09.2020
Our first class of graduate students has officially joined — we welcome Rachael Ditzler, Drake Johnson, Andrew King, and Ben Kruse to the group!
12.06.2019
We welcome two undergraduates—Skylar McGaughey and Elias Arroyo—to the group!
10.26.2019
The Zhukhovitskiy group opened its doors on July 1st! Graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with a passion for any flavor of synthesis and an interest in polymers are encouraged to contact Alex! (Shown in picture: Prof. Jeff Johnson, not Alex.)
10.18.2019
