Special Topics in Organic Chemistry II

A graduate seminar built around reading the recent organic chemistry literature rather than a fixed syllabus, with the current iteration orbiting molecular logic gates, photodynamic therapy agents, and chemosensors, essentially how organic molecules can be engineered to sense, signal, and act on biological targets. Most of your time goes into digging through primary papers, presenting them critically to the class, and defending your interpretation, capped by your own seminar at the end. It assumes you already have solid mechanistic organic chemistry under your belt and serves as a bridge into thesis-level research, where you stop learning reactions and start arguing about them.