01/2015

The CCHF's Annual Frontiers in C-H Functionalization was held at Emory University from January 15th-18th. With over 100 participants, ranging from undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, faculty members, interested faculty, industrial partners and interested industrial affiliates this years symposium was an exciting success.

On the 15th we brought together our partners from the pharmaceutical industry to present an afternoon symposium entitled “Chemistry in the Pharmaceutical Industry”. The presenters at this meeting were Rohan Beckwith from Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research, Eric Voight from AbbVie, Dennis Liotta from Emory University and L. C. Campeau from Merck.

In the evening we brought together students and postdocs from across the Center for a professional development session. The Birkman Assessment, a tool used by over 8000 companies and taken by over 3 million professionals was used to help inform our members how they interact and react in groups and collaborative environments.

On Friday the 16th we had a series of presentations from across the Center membership. Revolving around the thematic areas and how they are working together to address the grand challenges of the Center, these presentations described much of the recent advances made by the CCHF in the past year. This made for an exciting day of cutting-edge science, presented by the students, postdocs and faculty from the Center. The events of the day were wrapped up with a panel discussion with our industrial partners on some of the hurdles that face bringing C–H functionalization to industrial scales and the perspectives we need to be considering in moving forward.

Saturday and Sunday were spent with free flowing brainstorming sessions, both on the overall goals and targets for the Center and on the development of measurable milestones as we move forward.