Evan Curtin, a chemistry freshman student working under the supervision of Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel University, is the May 2011 Royal Society of Chemistry Open Notebook Science Challenge Award winner. He wins a cash prize from the RSC.

Evan's primary focus has centered on synthesizing aromatic imines and measuring their solubility in a number of organic solvents. This will allow us to generate Abraham descriptors for this class of compounds in order to predict their solubility in 70+ solvents. Coupled with our new model to include temperature dependent solubility, this should greatly facilitate optimal solvent prediction for this and related reactions.

Imine formation is of particular interest to the UsefulChem group because it is the first step of the Ugi reaction, which we have used to synthesize compounds with anti-malarial activity. But it is also a simple convenient reaction in itself to test our Solvent Selector's ability to predict optimal conditions (solvent and temperature) for isolation of products by precipitation.

Evan's synthesis experiments are available here:
http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp263
http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp262
http://usefulchem.wikispaces.com/Exp261

and his solubility experiments are listed here:
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp207
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp206
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp205
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp204
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp201
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp198
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/Exp197

Three more RSC ONS Awards will be made during 2011. Submissions from students in the US and the UK are still welcome.
For more information see:
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com
http://onschallenge.wikispaces.com/RSCAwards2010