This manuscript originates from John-Bruce Green’s PhD dissertation work. While working on a project related to monolayer chemistry impacted by surface roughness, I spent a fair bit of time reading what he had written. The opportunity arose for us to submit an article to a special issue honoring Ted Kuwana, Marc’s PhD advisor, and Marc thought that this would be a great piece to get published. I worked with Marc and John-Bruce to get everything put together, redrawing figures and helping with language to produce this publication.

Marc and I have taken to calling this “counter intuitive #1” because we have data for a related paper that we hope to get published as a sort of follow-on. That work relates to nucleophilic acyl substitution reactions on NHS ester-terminated self-assembled monolayers, and the impact of surface roughness on their reactivity.