No abstract

The alignment of intended learning outcomes for chemistry graduates and the actualised outcomes has been called into question recently. Opportunities to address this lie in the integration of undergraduate learning experiences in which students develop real-world skills and engage with problems that they may encounter as graduates in contemporary workplaces or modern society more broadly. This Highlight article provides an overview of three such approaches, including offering students authentic research experiences within (or outside of) normal degree programs, engaging students in citizen science projects, and considering curriculum reforms to better align with a systems thinking framework. Where possible, we provide explicit examples grounded in the Australian context, accompanied by some thoughts on the challenges that may be encountered when implementing these approaches in practice.

Phenazine is a tricyclic heteroarene that forms the core of diverse functional molecules including DNA intercalators. However, 2,8-disubstituted phenazines are rare, and this potentially limits the medicinal development of this class of heterocycles. Here we describe the synthesis of two new members of this compound class (i.e. dimethyl phenazine-2,8-dicarboxylate and the corresponding diacid), following a synthetic route that involved inter-and intramolecular Buchwald-Hartwig N-arylations. We also detail a simple NMR-based method for proving the 2,8-disubstitution pattern, in order to counterbalance suspected structural misassignments elsewhere in the peer-reviewed and patent literature.