Recently in Faculty & Staff Category

"How to stop doubting ..." was the banner headline topping the Opinion section of last Sunday's Oregonian newspaper (October 18, 2009). Prof. Julie Fry, the author of this commentary, crafted a two page argument intended to move the paper's readers past the stale non-debate over the existence and causes of global warming and towards the pressing problem of "what can we do about it?" To this end, she asked and answered four questions about the basis of current scientific understanding of climate change:

• How do scientists establish consensus, and what is the role of consensus documents like the IPCC reports?
• What is the role of computer models? Why should we trust them?
• What aspects of climate science are firmly established?
• What are some remaining uncertainties?

Predictably, this piece, just like Julie's previous foray into the Oregonian arena ("Don't Trust Charlatans ...", August 7, 2009), attracted a large number of heated comments in the newspaper's online zone.

This title introduced an op-ed piece in last Friday's Oregonian (Aug 7, 2009) by professors Arthur Glasfeld and Julie Fry. The two chemists explained in straightforward terms how the vast weight of scientific evidence and scientific opinion supports global warming and the significant role played by human-generated greenhouse gases. Score two points for Reed College chemistry!

Randy Hicks, a longtime fixture in the Chem 101/102 labs, the Chem 102 end-of-year fireworks display, and one of two discoverers of the Periodic Table of the Cupcakes, wrote to me last summer (yikes!) from his (then) new location in the Chemistry department at Wheaton College with wonderful news. He and Jennifer had just "published" the Synthesis of a novel biochemical composite material: Reed Aleksander Hicks on August 3, 2008 (follow the link for full publication and description). Which means that Reed Aleksander is getting ready to celebrate his first birthday. Have a happy one, Reed (and ask for ice cream).

Another "news" story from 2007 that nearly got lost in the changeover from the old computer system to the current one was the transplant of our visiting professor Jodi O'Donnell to Siena College. She spent two lovely years with us, 2005-07, before moving east. Here's what she wrote shortly after arriving in Loudonville (Albany), NY:

I hope all is well with you! I just wanted to drop a line to say hi and pass my new contact information to you. We are settling in well in NY and enjoying exploring all the wonderful outdoor activities upstate NY has to offer. So far we've been whitewater rafting in the Adirondacks and camping in the Catskills! Both are only an hour's drive from our new home. We're still adjusting to the evil heat and humidity, though! We're living in an apartment for now, as sadly, we are still homeowners in Oregon, but hopefully that will change soon.

I've started to move into my office and lab at Siena and am getting to know my new colleagues. Everyone has been very helpful and kind, making the transition go quite smoothly. There are three "new kids" in the Chemistry department alone, so we are able to work together to find our way around.

Prof. Maggie Geselbracht organized a symposium in the Division of Inorganic Chemistry at the 237th national meeting of the American Chemical Society held in Salt Lake City, March 22-26. The symposium was called "Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry" and featured three half-day sessions of oral presentations both by faculty members and undergraduate students plus a poster session.

Response to the symposium was so enthusiastic that the Division's leadership decided to add this topic to the list of regularly contributed symposia beginning with the spring 2010 ACS meeting. Maggie says she is "very excited that the DIC is recognizing the role that undergraduate institutions and undergraduate research plays in expanding the frontiers of science."

A few days ago, I posted a picture of VIPEr tattoos, a physical manifestation of IONiC, the Inorganic Online Network of Inorganic Chemists started by Maggie Geselbracht and several collaborators across the nation. It seems, though, that a merely online presence wasn't enough for this lot. Maggie, her six IONiC collaborators, and Ethan Benatan, Reed's director of Computer User Services and the technical guru for the VIPEr-IONiC project, have gone hard-copy and published an article in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education (JCE, 2009, 86(1), 123) titled, "IONiC: A Cyber-Enabled Community of Practice for Improving Inorganic Chemical Education".

Paging through the Autumn '08 issue of the Reed Magazine, I came across a photo (p. 47) containing two smiling faces that I knew well: Julia, currently a 4th year graduate student at Northwestern University and her (Reed) thesis advisor, Maggie. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that the two were also showing off matching (and removable) VIPEr tattoos to a photographer at the Gordon conference on Solid State Chemistry last July.

V.I.P.E.r. is really the acronym for the Virtual Inorganic Pedagogical Electronic Resource that Maggie and her collaborators at I.O.N.I.C. (the Inorganic Online Network of Inorganic Chemists) have created. Although the public face of I.O.N.I.C.-V.I.P.E.r. is a highly useful set of web pages devoted to the teaching of inorganic chemistry, its deeper purpose is to help the Man from U.N.C.L.E. defeat the agents of T.H.R.U.S.H. To accomplish this, they distribute V.I.P.E.r. tattoos to interested chemists.