September 2026
Graduate Awards
PhD student Joe Nazak, William Howlett, and Mitch MacEachern have all won Department of Chemistry graduate awards! Congrats and keep up the great work!
Synthetic inorganic chemistry at the edge(s) of the continent
We run systematic, curiosity-driven studies in (macro)molecular main group chemistry, often with collaborators who have applied interests.
Tier II Canada Research Chair in Inorganic Polymers & Materials @ University of Victoria
Adjunct Associate Professor @ Dalhousie University
What we study
Functional materials
New classes of low-carbon, inorganic polymers and materials for green technologies. Recent work includes PN cage polymers for high-temperature dielectric films and PN cage-based MOFs.
Coordination chemistry
New concepts in main group pincer ligand coordination chemistry that challenge our understanding of structure and bonding while making chemical synthesis more efficient.
Recognition
May 2026
Governor General's Gold Medal in Sciences and Engineering
Tamina Kirsch (MSc 2025) won the 2026 medal at Dalhousie Chemistry for her work on trianionic NCN pincer complexes of antimony and bismuth. It is the third year in the last five that someone from the group has won the top thesis prize.
February 2026
RSC Chemical Communications Emerging Investigator Lectureship
Awarded to Saurabh Chitnis. Read the announcement
Latest news
September 2026
Pinelopi's first-author paper on PN cage based adamantanoid ligands is on ChemRxiv - check it out on the publications page!
Anjali's first-author paper has been accepted in RSC Polymer Chemistry.
We welcome back postdoc Adrian Lorenzana from his parental leave.
August 2026
Our new Bruker D8 Venture dual source single crystal diffractometer was installed.
Kate Roberge finished her summer term with a talk at the Inorganic Chemistry Exchange conference in Waterloo, Ontario.
July 2026
With the Ragogna group, we showed area-selective deposition of PN cages on gold and copper surfaces. The paper is accepted in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
PhD student Anjali's first paper is on ChemRxiv. PN cage diols condensed with dichlorosilanes give hybrid phosphazene-organosiloxane polymers.
Earlier in 2026
June: Chitnis group visited the CSC in Toronto where Will Howlett and Joe Nazak won poster and presentation awards! Congrats both!
May: Kate Roberge joined for the summer through the Inorganic Chemistry Exchange program, and Elise Bennett joined as a graduate student working on organometallic complexes of p-block elements.
April: Tyler Hannah defended his PhD and heads to the Crudden lab at Queen's University. Raul De La Garza Puente began a joint MSc with the Chitnis and Hof groups.
February: Maryam's work on PN cage polymers as high-temperature dielectric films was accepted in Advanced Functional Materials. Pinelopi Tsami won Best Poster at Graduate Student Research Day.
January: Will's dynamic bismuth pincer ligand chemistry appeared in Angewandte Chemie. Three undergraduates joined the lab.
Join the group
Interested in working with us? Send us a message.