Academics

News from the Department of Chemistry

Since our last alumni newsletter, the department has continued its successful development of undergraduate chemists.  Happily, we’ve had no staff changes since our last newsletter.  Check out what we’ve been up to below.

Instrumentation upgrades
In the effort to continually improve our capabilities, we’ve expanded our departmental computational power with a new multi-processor server.  The PQS Quantum Cube server crunches numbers for Dawn Wiser’s research really quickly with 4 simultaneous processors.  On the reaction side, we purchased two new microwave reactors that are used in organic research and in the sophomore-level organic laboratory.  Our spectroscopy arsenal has been enhanced with six OceanOptics UV-Vis mini-diode array spectrometers attached to wireless-capable PCs.  We’ve also recently upgraded our dual-beam fluorimeter to computer control (you wouldn’t believe the resolution we now get!)

Faculty notes

Bill Martin continues to engage students in summer research and Senior Theses.  In fact, this past year, Bill had four senior thesis students working in his laboratories.  They continue to improve upon the organic synthesis of transition-metal mediated couplings using the recent additions of microwave reactors and flash chromatography in the laboratory. All four students plan on heading to graduate school in organic chemistry next fall.  This summer, Bill has five students working with him in the laboratory.

Laura Kateley continues to enhance our instrument-intensive organic chemistry laboratories. She’s recently incorporated the new microwave reactors described above and expanded the syntheses to include organometallic Suzuki couplings, and Heck and Grignard reactions.  For those of you who loved nitration reactions with concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids, you’ll be sad to know that we now use nitronium tetrafluroborate.  The rest of you will be pleased to know that Laura and Bill keep upgrading and “greening” the experiments. 

Jason Cody spent 2004-2005 back at the Institut des Matériaux de Nantes with his colleagues from his postdoctoral year.  The first of three major projects was just recently published (Inorg. Chem. 2007, 46, 1502-1506).  When he tried to prepare the solar cell materials in the first paper via a solventothermal route, he ended up with two completely new compounds.  Preliminary results of this work were presented at a Gordon Research Conference in Lucca, Italy in 2005; the completed project was presented at the Materials Research Conference in San Francisco in April 2007.  Jason’s most recent Senior Thesis student, Kenneth Finch (’07) prepared two new compounds in the laboratory using ionic liquids for materials synthesis and just presented a poster on his results at the spring ACS meeting here in Chicago.  Jason gave a lecture at the University of Kiel, Germany, in June.

Dawn Wiser received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor.  The computational chemistry project she completed with students here on campus was published (Dunn, Adam R. (’04); Sweet, Lucas, E. (’02); Wiser, Dawn C.; LoCoco, Matthew D.; Jordan, Richard, F. Organometallics, 2004, 23, 5671).  She is currently enjoying her sabbatical year at Northwestern University working with Mark Ratner on nanoscience.  She is doing computational chemistry work on understanding how to make organic non-linear optical materials and organic light-emitting diodes.  Her most recent senior thesis student, Rachel Alter (’07), just presented her recent results at the Chicago spring ACS meeting.

Lori Del Negro spent last fall in Houston as part of the NOAA campaign to monitor the air pollution over the area.  You probably saw her student, Sharada Bean (’07) in the equipment airplane in the fall issue of the alumni magazine.  Her focus was on measurements of air toxics using a PTRMS (Proton Transfer Reaction Mass Spectrometer) technique to quantify VOCs (volatile organic compounds) in the atmosphere.  She’s now processing the mountain of data that was collected by the airplane and the offshore research vessel during the 8-week campaign.  Her research student, Frank Pierri (‘07), worked with our GC-MS on establishing validation measurements for air toxics from samples that could be collected in the Chicago area in the near future.

Amy Abe (’74) continues to teach in the department and to develop laboratory experiments using FT-NMR.  She’s currently working with magnetic resonance imaging for 60 MHz FT-NMR systems.  She wrote an extensive review chapter on undergraduate NMR laboratory experiments (ACS Symposium series, in press).  Check out our newly improved NMR web pages that showcase the Department’s efforts at /academics/programs/chem/nmr.asp.

Elizabeth Fischer (’72) has enjoyed teaching a First Year Studies course on Medicine in Chicago wherein she has taken her class to visit several of our alumni listed below at their various medical schools.  This year, she created a new non-sequence course for education majors called “Teaching the Physical World.”  She’s also working with the Linking Learning Communities project that couples teachers from the Waukegan public schools with faculty from the Departments of Mathematics, History, Chemistry, and Education.

Melanie Werst is still a valued colleague who continues to teach introductory laboratories and non-sequence courses.

Photos
SAACS activities:  Measure of our success with Carmen Elementary School, Waukegan

Chemistry majors lined up along the wall with Elizabeth while eager 5th graders look on

  
Alumni Updates

Leigh Anne Furgerson (’04) is in her third year of graduate school in chemistry at the University of Illinois, Champagne/Urbana.  She appears on campus occasionally as her fiancé Greg (who enrolled in Jason’s “Our Chemical World” course last year) will be graduating this spring.

Parker Brown (’03) continues to pursue his degree in film making; one of his films was included in the Film Festival held on campus last November.

Chrissy Dickerson Boyke (’01) and Bill Boyke (’01) welcomed Robert Joseph Boyke into the world on Feb 12, 2008.  All are healthy and happy (albeit tired).

Mariela Hebben (’01) will soon finish her PhD in Biochemical Engineering at the University of Delft, the Netherlands.  She was in Chicago last October and gave a seminar on her unusual international path.

Andy Flick (’00) will complete his Ph.D. in synthetic organic chemistry at Emory University this May.  He will then start as a Senior Scientist at Pfizer in CT.

Cathy (Gapinsky) Peters (’00) has been an Analytical Chemist for BioLab, Inc. located in Lawrenceville, Georgia since 2002.  She married Jason Peters also in 2002.

Kelli Markham (’98) and her husband Dale Evans (’98) have reproduced their biochemical experiment.  Ian has a younger brother, Evan, who is now over a year old.  Kelli will be on campus this spring as part of a conference on Nuclear Energy.  She is currently General Scientist at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Cliff Berkman (’86) has recently moved to Washington State University and been promoted to full professor.  Last fall, Cliff came to campus and gave a research seminar on his work.  Check out his research at http://www.chem.wsu.edu/people/faculty/cberkman.html.

David Schump (’73) flew up to Chicago (with his pilot’s license) and was on campus last August with his wife and daughter. 

Alan Bills ('61) is enjoying his garden of hardy palms in Beaumont Texas since his retirement from Westvaco Corp after 37.5 years as a Research Scientist and Process Engineer (PhD from the Institute of Paper Chemistry, Lawrence University).  It is possible to grow 50 species of palms down in Beaumont!

Ken Rhode (’46) shared great stories about his experiences with the development of nuclear power at Argonne National Laboratory.

Plea for help
Please continue to spread the word about our great chemistry program to high school students in your area.  We are always looking for enthusiastic students to earn our science scholarships and rise to the challenge in our laboratories.