Department of Chemistry

Welcome to the Que Group

Members of the Que Group on the banks of the Mississippi River, Summer 2011. From front row through back row and left to right:

Row 1: Feifei Li, Thakshila Wickramaratne, Jen Bigelow, Larry Que, Van Vu

Row 2: Anusree Mukherjee, Praneeth Kummaya , Yan Feng, Matt Cranswick, Youngju Song, Partha Das, Mayank Puri, Andy Fielding, Gen-Qiang (Ken) Xue

Row 3: Greg Rhode, Kathy Van Heuvelen, Jordan Degaynor (summer intern), Andy Jasniewski, Scott Kleespies

Back: Aidan McDonald

Group2011

	Lisa Engstrom, Postdoc Lisa comes to the Que Group from UC Davis, where she obtained a Ph.D. in 2011, working with Sheila David, where she studied FeS cluster-containing DNA repair enzymes. Her postdoctoral work in Prof. Que's group will be focused on gaining insight into the oxygen activation mechanism of Deoxyhypusing hydroxylase (DOHH). She is from Minnesota and obtained her B.A. in chemistry from College of St. Benedict.	Williamson Oloo, Postdoc Will Oloo studied organic and organomatallic chemistry with Dr. Andrei Verdernikov at the University of Maryland, where he took his Ph.D. in May 2011. He began his tenure with the Que Group in September 2011. Will is working on designing and developing bio-inspired iron complexes for oxidation of hydrocarbons and understanding their reaction mechanisms.
	Jai Prakash, Postdoc Jai is a native of India (Bokaro, Jharkhand) with his B.Sc. in chemistry from St. Stephen's College, Delhi (2004). His M.S. is from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore (2007), under T. N. Guru Row and S. Chandrasekhar. He received his Ph.D. from Wayne State in 2007, working in Jeremy Kodanko's lab on "Metal complexes of non-heme ligands: Biological applications." He moved to UMN and to Prof. Que's lab in 2012.. PUBLICATIONS Inorg. Chem. 2012, 51, 2689-98 Metallomics, 2012, 4, 174-78 J. Cell. Biochem., 2012, 113, 2567-75 Inorg. Chem. 2011, 50, 3934-45	Jennifer Bigelow Jennifer Bigelow is originally from Seattle, but has stuck around in Minnesota after completing her B.A. in chemistry at Carleton College. She started at UMN in 2009, later joining the Que Group. Her current project involves diiron enzyme synthetic model complexes that show similar reactivity to ribonucleotide reductase class 1a and soluble methane monooxygenase.
	Andrew Fielding 2009 M.S. in inorganic chemistry; University of Minnesota 2007 B.S. in chemistry and biochemistry with a minor in microbiology; Idaho State University. He enjoys biking, sailing and boomerangs. PUBLICATIONS Fielding A. J.; Kovaleva E. G.; Farquhar E. R.; Lipscomb J. D.; Que L. Jr. A Hyperactive Cobalt-Substituted Extradiol-Cleaving Catechol Dioxygenase, J. Biol. Inorg. Chem., 2010, 16, 341–355.	Greg Rhode Greg received his bachelor's degree from North Dakota State University, B.S. chemistry and chemistry education, in 2003. For the next few years (2004-2007) he taught science in high school and junior high school teacher in Banks, Oregon and Eureka, California. Studying under Victor Merrykin at theUniversity of Minnesota Duluth, he took his MS in 2009 and came to the Que Group the following fall.
	Mayank Puri Mayank grew up outside of Philly, with the grand hope of starting a record label with his friends. Despite making sweet t-shirts, he moved to Boston to attend college at Brandeis University and work in the organometallic chemistry lab of Oleg Ozerov. Upon graduating in 2008, Mayank stayed in the Boston area to work for a start-up company, QD Vision, where he synthesized quantum dots for solid-state lighting applications. In 2010, Mayank began a PhD program at UMN, where he joined the Que Group and is currently studying the coordination chemistry of non-heme iron complexes.	Scott Kleespies Scott is a second-year graduate student in Dr. Que’s lab. His research focuses on trapping and spectroscopically characterizing different reactive intermediates. His BS is from Haverford College, studying under Dr. Robert Scarrow, and his senior research involved working on novel oxygen-activating complexes. After graduating, Scott worked for two years in the analytical department of a start-up biofuels company in Madison, Wisconsin. before joining Dr. Que’s lab in the fall of 2010.
	Andy Jasniewski Andy is originally from West Allis, Wisconsin and received his BS in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As an undergraduate, he worked to characterize and synthesize a model complex of the Mn-dependent superoxide dismutase in Thomas Brunold's lab. Andy found that he enjoyed using spectroscopy and synthesis to answer questions relevant to the bio-inorganic field, and he realized that the best place to continue working on these types of problems was in the Que Group.	Youngju Song Youngju came to the Que Group from Korea as an exchange scholar and now servse as a Graduate Research Assistant. Among other things, she is working on synthesis of new iron ligands and catalysts for hydrocarbon oxidation and systematic catalytic oxidation experiments to optimize reaction conditions.
	Anna Komor Anna hails from beautiful upstate New York and graduated from Wesleyan University with a B.A. in chemistry. She spent two years teaching secondary school science in Phoenix, Arizona before coming to the University of Minnesota for graduate school. Her research combines biochemistry and inorganic spectroscopic methods to investigate the diiron enzyme Aldehyde Deformylase, a new and unique entry into the non-heme diiron enzyme canon that shows potential as a component of biofuels production systems .	Moly Javadi Maedeh (Moly) Javadi is a visiting scholar to the Que Group, a Ph.D. student from the University of Isfahan, Iran, studying with Dr. Majid Moghadam.. Her dissertation is entitled, "Preparation of bis-Oxazoline Commplexes and the Investigation of their Catalytic Activities in the Oxidation of Organic Compounds."
Ancient Que Group/History Erik Farquhar, 2008	Recent Que Group Alumni/History Katherine Van Huevelen Aidan McDonald Matthew Cranswick Van Vu Gen-Quiang (Ken) Xue Yan Feng Anusree Mukherjee Partha Das		Travels with Larry ICBIC 15, August 2011