By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryWednesday, Sep. 02, 2026 Paul Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, has been named the recipient of the 2027 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Organometallic Chemistry. This year’s national awardees, selected for outstanding achievements in chemistry, were announced this week by the ACS. Chirik is a leading expert in…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryTuesday, Jun. 30, 2026 The Princeton Department of Chemistry publishes nearly 300 journal papers each year. Some of them make quite a stir. Others glide along under the radar with citations that ebb and flow based on whether a particular field is in play. Still others lodge themselves in their authors’…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryThursday, Apr. 23, 2026 Paul Chirik shifts into high-energy mode when the subject of plastic arises, as it so often does these days. For Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry and a longtime researcher on methods that could dramatically improve chemical recycling, Earth Day provides an opportunity to introduce another perspective, one…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryThursday, Apr. 16, 2026 Tianyi Zhang, a fourth-year graduate student in the Paul Chirik Group, has been named a 2026-27 Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellow, acknowledging outstanding performance and professional promise through one of Princeton University’s highest honorifics. Zhang was selected for his research in organometallic catalysis. His thesis title is Understanding Spin and…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryTuesday, Nov. 11, 2025 The functionalization of carbon–hydrogen (C-H) bonds so crucial to catalysis is a complex chemical process with many challenges. Improving its efficiency has huge ramifications for medicines, energy needs, and the sustainability of the nation’s products and technologies. That goal has been at the heart of the Paul Chirik Lab’s…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryThursday, Dec. 07, 2023 The Chirik Group is chipping away at one of the great challenges of metal-catalyzed C–H functionalization with a new method that uses a cobalt catalyst to differentiate between bonds in fluoroarenes, functionalizing them based on their intrinsic electronic properties. In a paper published this week in Science, researchers show they…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryThursday, Jul. 27, 2023 Continuing in its mission to uncover new reactivities with first-row transition metals, the Chirik Lab releases a landmark study on carbon-carbon bond formation using cobalt that underscores its utility in the synthesis of pharmaceutically relevant molecules. The mechanistic study—one of the first of its kind for this little-understood catalyst—builds…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryTuesday, Apr. 18, 2023 Paul Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, has been appointed Chair of the Department of Chemistry for a term of four years beginning on July 1. He succeeds current Chair Gregory Scholes, the William S. Tod Professor of Chemistry, who has held the post since July…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryMonday, Mar. 20, 2023 When Connor MacNeil first came to Princeton Chemistry in the fall of 2019 as a Visiting Student Research Collaborator (from the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada), he worked with the Chirik Lab. Those four months with Chirik—“He is a P.I. I would have followed to Alaska”—were not enough for MacNeil, so…
By Wendy PlumpDepartment of ChemistryTuesday, Jan. 31, 2023 Paul Chirik, the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Chemistry, has been named a 2022 Fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the most distinctive honors in the scientific community. Chirik was selected for establishing the field of catalysis using Earth-abundant elements and…