Our research touches all areas of synthetic chemistry, designing new methods and materials to investigate un(der)explored molecular architectures.
The Molecular Design Studio develops new reactions and materials across organic, inorganic, organometallic, and materials chemistry. We don't confine ourselves to a single subdiscipline — our research follows the chemistry wherever it leads, driven by curiosity about underexplored molecular architectures and the transformations they enable.
We are a living laboratory. From their very first year of undergraduate study, our students learn what it means to be a chemist by doing chemistry. They develop core lab skills hands-on, and build theoretical understanding through practice — the way chemists have always learned best. Every student who joins the group is a real researcher working on real, original problems.
This approach — broad in scope, grounded in experiment, and led entirely by undergraduates — is what makes the Stolley Group distinctive.
Undergraduates learn chemistry by doing it — building practical skills from day one while developing scientific intuition through genuine research questions.
Developing new reactions and exploring underexplored functional groups across organic, inorganic, organometallic, and materials chemistry.
Working across disciplines and institutions to connect our chemistry to broader scientific challenges in materials, energy, and beyond — providing synthetic support and chemical expertise to collaborators across fields.
Research in our lab is focused on marketable methods and products. Students are fully engaged in the development and expansion of intellectual property — learning not just how to do chemistry, but how to bring it to the world.
Unsaturated cyanamides are a vastly underexplored class of functional group with unique reactivity at the intersection of nitrile and enamine chemistry. We are developing new transformations of these molecules — exploring their fundamental chemical behaviour and applying these reactions in complex synthetic settings.
We are pursuing the total synthesis of natural products featuring 1,3-dione chromophores — molecules with rich photophysical properties and potential applications in optoelectronics and materials science. Our emphasis is on non-pharmaceutical targets that open new doors in functional molecular design.
We design and synthesize conductive organic polymers and related macromolecular architectures with defined electronic properties. This work sits at the interface of synthetic methodology and materials chemistry, connecting our molecular-level insights to functional polymer design.
Exploring the relationship between molecular chirality and spin-selective electron transport — an emerging area at the frontier of chemistry and physics. We synthesize chiral molecular systems to probe how stereochemical information at the molecular scale influences quantum mechanical behaviour.
We synthesize organic and organometallic materials with magnetic properties, including work on organic-based magnets such as vanadium tetracyanoethylene (V[TCNE]x). These materials exhibit remarkably low magnetic damping and are of interest for spintronic device applications and fundamental studies of magnetism at the molecular scale.