— 2024 —
June 2024: A huge congratulations to Azalea and Angela, who are both pursuing industrial internships! Azalea received the Merck Research Award and Angela will be joining Apple!!
May 2025: Jerry is featured on a UofT Chemistry’s news story about his undergraduate experience. He will be joining Princeton Chemistry in the Fall for his PhD!
April 2024: Sofia and Olivia share their thoughts about the upcoming PoWER conference.
April 2024: Undergraduates Jerry and Lucia give fantastic presentations at SOUCC! Also, Jerry brings home a presentation prize.
April 2024: Helen attends the 1st meeting of Scialog: Automating Chemical Laboratories, cosponsored by RCSA, Beckman Fund, Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, and Walder Foundation.
March 2024: Helen gives an invited talk at Penn State in the Department of Chemistry. She reunites with many old friends and forgets to take a photo. She also wishes she got to pet Henri :)
February 2024: The group goes on a retreat at Limberlost! Cooking, boardgames, ice skating, and more!
February 2024: Helen’s life-sized statue is discovered by her former PI, Prof. Zhenan Bao. Check out the story “Breaking the mold: Vibrant statues highlight women in STEM“ on the Stanford Report, also featured on UofT Chemistry Department News.
February 2024: Our collaboration with Prof. Minor Ashizawa and Naoya Nozaki is out is RSC Applied Polymers!
January 2024: Helen delivers department seminars at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University. It was her first time visiting these beautiful campuses!!
— 2023 —
December 2023: Annual Holiday dinner at Helen’s! This time, we had Descendants Pizza.
November 2023: Stanley’s paper on Low-cost Self-driving Laboratories: The "Frugal Twin" Concept is now online at Digital Discovery!
October 2023: Helen gives a presentation at the Chemical Science Symposium at the Royal Society of Chemistry in London. A beautiful venue!
October 2023: Nathan’s first research paper is accepted to Macromolecules! Thanks to Azalea, Angela, and Shine for their contributions!
October 2023: Team Tran is mentioned in the c&en article on “degradable electronic medical devices power up”.
September 2023: Helen gives a talk at the International Symposium on Polyelectrolytes in Prague and gets to see the famous Hofmeister plaque with fellow enthusiasts.
July 2023: Abbey is selected for one of the 2023 Teaching Assistant Excellence Awards!!
May 2023: We welcome Sofia Michailovich and Olivia Mann Delaney as new first years to the group with a picnic! Olivia is jointly supervised with Prof. Edgar.
May 2023: Azalea’s poster is selected as one of the top posters for the Green Chemistry Initiative conference. Angela was a co-author on this work.
May 2023: Goodbye to Eloise, who is off to Korea for a MITACS internship at Seoul University with Professor Ki-tae Nam! Also, congratulations to Shine Huang, who was awarded the Chemistry Teaching Fellowship Program (CTFP).
April 2023: Helen is co-lead on a successful Canada First Excellence Research Fund grant on accelerated discovery of molecules and materials. Valued at nearly $200 million, it is the largest research grant awarded in the history of UofT. Learn more here.
April 2023: Congratulations to Abbey and Nathan for receiving the CGS-D and CGS-M, respectively!
March 2023: Congratulations to Azalea, who was selected as a CAS Future Leader! The first from our group!
February 2023: Azalea and Angela’s research paper on biobased, degradable, and conjugated poly(azomethine)s is now out in JACS!
February 2023: Angela’s work in collaboration with Pengfei from Prof. Xinyu Liu’s lab is now out in Nature Communications!
— 2022 —
December 2022: We close out 2022 with a sushi dinner at Helen’s!
December 2022: Helen is selected as one of the Rising Stars in Polymers!
September 2022: Our new perspective, led by Abbey, is now out is ACS Polymers Au! Her artwork also lands on the cover!
September 2022: Helen shares her thoughts on the Nobel Prize with C&EN live!
August 2022: Helen is quoted in C&EN about the Rogers group work on temporary pacemakers.
August 2022: Good bye to Katya Naomi, who visited us from Mexico through a MITACS fellowship. She is off to her next adventure in Korea!
July 2022: Helen is featured as C&EN Talented 12.
June 2022: Helen joins the JACS Au 2022 Early Career Advisory Board
June 2022: Helen co-chairs the Tosoh Polymer conference in Hollywood, CA.
May 2022: The group wishes Atang, Jasemine, and Hana the best on their next adventures! Atang will be doing a DAAD RISE summer internship; Jasmine will be heading to UBC for her PhD; Hana wins fellowships for summer research at UofT!
May 2022: Congratulations to Azalea for being awarded the Chemistry Teaching Fellowship Program (CTFP)!
April 2022: Huge congratulations to all the graduate students! Angela, Azalea, and Jon received the CGS-D and Abbey receives the CGS-M!
March 2022 : Helen is featured at the Smithsonian #IF/THEN exhibit!
February 2022 : Team Tran goes on its first winter retreat in Arrowhead!
January 2022: Helen receives the 2021 Dorothy Shoichet Women Faculty in Science Award of Excellence.
— 2021 —
December 2021: Helen is featured on UofT Groundbreaker’s video series.
December 2021: Helen shares her thoughts on the Future Talk Podcast.
September 2021: Our new paper, led by Angela, is now out is MRS Bulletin!
September 2021: Helen is featured at The Works Museum.
August 2021: Goodbye to Isabella, who is now back at McGill University.
July 2021: Hana and Helen goes live on Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls instagram live to demo photochromic putty!
July 2021: Helen joins Prof. Ali Javey, Prof. John Rogers, and Prof. Roozbeh Jaffari on a panel at the MRS Career Discovery Series.
July 2021: Goodbye to Katie, who is off to graduate school at UCLA!
July 2021: Check out our review on "Self-assembled free-floating nanomaterials from sequence-defined polymers", now out in the Journal of Polymer Science! A great team effort by Jon, Katie , Angela, Azalea, Hana, and Atang !
July 2021: Helen is featured on the Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls x Camp GoldieBlox show: Adventures at Eureka Point. Check out the whimsical episode here!
June 2021: Congratulations to Azalea for being awarded the CGS-M (Canada Graduate Scholarship) as well as Abby and Jon for being awarded the OGS (Ontario Graduate Scholarship). Also, Jon is awarded the Chemistry Teaching Fellowship Program (CTFP) and the TA Excellence Award
May 2021: The first paper from the Tran triplets is now online! Check out Azalea, Angela, and Jon’s mini-review entitled “Bioderived and degradable polymers for transient electronics”.
May 2021: Helen is featured on a virtual STEM education series called “The Whynauts”, sponsored by the Perot Science Museum.
May 2021: Welcome incoming first year graduate student Abigail Clapperton and visiting NSERC USRA Isabella Vettese from McGill University!
— 2020 —
December 2020: Welcome undergraduates Hana El-Haddad and Atang Peloewetse to the team! We are so excited to provide you with a meaningful undergraduate experience in the coming years!
November 2020: Helen makes her debut on Twitch for National STEM day!
October 2020: Helen gives a virtual interview with Emily Logue-Rose at the Cincinnati Museum Center as part of their STEM Girls program.
August 2020: With Danielle Mai (Asst. Professor at Stanford University, Chemical Engineering), Helen hosts the Stanford d.school Starter Kit, a virtual workshop to learn and practice design mindsets and methods. Many young professionals in the polymer chemistry and engineering community were invited to attend! Learn more here to host one too!
August 2020: Azalea is awarded the Faculty of Arts & Science Top (FAST) Doctoral Fellowship! A huge congratulations!
July 2020: Helen is profiled on the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education’s “What’s it like Being an ORISE Researcher?” section.
July 2020: Helen is featured on the Girl Scouts STEM Career Exploration Cadette Badge!
June 2020: Helen gives a virtual talk to the Rowland Institute at Harvard University. Thank you for the invitation!
May 2020: Helen is featured on the CBS TV show called Mission Unstoppable. You can watch it on CBS (Season 1, Episode 23) or Youtube (no commercials).
April/May 2020: Through the Stanford Polymer Collective, Helen hosts virtual Lunch-and-Learn seminars, featuring rising polymer postdoctoral scholars.
March 2020: Helen joins the University of Toronto! She is cross-appointed in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. Read the announcement here.
February 2020: Undergraduate Kathy Liu publishes a first author MRS Bulletin article!
— 2019 —
November 2019: Helen’s paper on “Stretchable and Fully Degradable Semiconductors for Transient Electronics” is published in ACS Central Science. Read the press releases on C&E News and Popular Mechanics.
October 2019: Helen is selected as an AAAS IF/THEN Ambassador. She is pictured here with the philanthropist, Lyda Hill, at the award dinner. Learn more about Lyda Hill Philanthropies here.
September 2019: Helen is featured in a Chemistry Short (supported by the Dreyfus Foundation) video centered on her postdoc advisor Prof. Zhenan Bao at Stanford University. Watch it here.
