A colleague shared a yellowed, crumpled page from a book, “A Half Century in Chemistry at UCLA, 1932-1982” by Francis Blacet (Acad. Pub. Services, 1987). On this piece of paper was a short biography of Prof. Thomas Conger Morgan (1874-1940), Reed College’s first chemistry professor. It reads,
There’s a tall stack of magazines on the table in my front hallway. It grows and grows from August until May, and only then does it lose some height. I recently rescued “Pathogenius,” the March 2013 issue of the Reed magazine, from the stack and found all kinds of chemists between its covers…
Prof. Silas Cook ’99 used cascade reactions to synthesize artemisinin (photo courtesy of Indiana University)
Prof. Patrick McDougal surfaced on p. 5 as ‘acting dean of the faculty’ (“Reed Names New Dean of the Faculty”) and again on p. 30 as thesis mentor of Indiana U. chemistry professor Silas Cook ’99 (“Fighting Malaria on the Cheap”) … “Reed Shrinks Carbon Footprint” (p. 9) was a shout-out to the College’s ongoing battle with a triatomic molecule: carbon dioxide … Shantal Sudbrack ’97 contributed an essay (p. 10-1) from her vantage point as Alumni Board President … which was followed by a request from Julia Chamberlain ’03 for (“Far Flung”, p. 11) Reedies who would like to recombine for occasional events like Thirsty Third Tuesdays …
Congratulations to all of the Reed seniors who graduated last Monday. And a special shout-out to the three chemists from the Class of 2014 who were elected to Phi Beta Kappa: Rachel Yahn (BMB), Talya Levitz (BMB), Trevor Lohrey (Chemistry).
The President’s Summer Fellowship program was inaugurated in 2012 by President John Kroger with a generous gift from trustee Dan Greenberg ’62 and Susan Steinhauser. The program, which is only open to Reed students, is highly competitive. Among the eight winners: Johnny Mendoza ’15 for “Green Chemistry and Green Chemistry Labs.” Johnny will work on the project this summer under the direction of Dr. Julia Robinson-Surry ’06. Read more about Johnny’s project and the other winners here.
Thirty years is a long time in Professor Years.
When Ron McClard joined the Reed faculty in 1984 chemistry was being taught in the old chemistry building, a leaky, cold structure with broken plumbing, inadequate office space, and poorly equipped labs.* But Ron seized the opportunity he was given and began doing and publishing research with his students. Before long he had attracted a cohort of younger faculty united by the same vision: that Reed students were capable of rising to the challenge of doing publication-worthy research.
Ron is retiring from teaching at the end of this school year and we celebrated his contributions to the college at today’s end-of-the-school-year faculty luncheon. Among them: obtaining NSF funding for major instruments including two FT-NMR spectrophotometers, publishing 50 papers (at least 15 with Reed student co-authors), teaching in every departmental specialty (biochem, of course, but also analytical, organic, and physical) except for inorganic chemistry, and supervising 50 senior theses spread over five different majors, including what might be the only Reed thesis for interdisciplinary work “in biochemistry and mathematics.”**
Barbara Ehrenreich has been engaged in a life-long search for the truth. Starting Reed College as a chemist, she completed her thesis under the direction of physicist Prof. Jean DeLord (thesis title: Electrochemical oscillations of the silicon anode). Starting graduate school as a physicist, she completed her PhD in biology. Her search for the truth has taken her undercover in low-wage jobs and to the front lines of the feminist struggle. Ehrenreich discussed her most recent book, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything, with Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (April 8 episode).
A couple years back we reported on Jeremy’s involvement in the Yale-NUS College experiment (“Jeremy Kua ’96 Helps Launch Yale-NUS Startup”, July 1, 2012). The novelty associated with two well-established universities pooling their resources to create a small liberal arts college in southeast Asia apparently still strikes a chord so the Chronicle of Higher Ed sent its reporter back to Singapore for a status update. The result was published in the Chronicle on September 9, 2013 (“Singapore Meets the Ivy League: Blurring Disciplines, Crossing Borders”). The cover boy for the issue was, naturally enough, Jeremy wearing his trademark backwards cap leading a seminar on scientific inquiry, blurring cultures and crossing disciplines.
This just in from Ilsa, “I’ve decided to go to OHSU! I’m planning on joining the Physiology and Pharmacology department this summer, if everything works out.”
About 4 years ago, well make that nearly 5, this blog published a Happy Birthday greeting to Reed Aleksander Hicks. He was celebrating his first birthday and also learning to deal with life on the move. Reed and his parents moved across the country (going east) and then moved across the country again (going west) winding up where it all began: in Portland, Oregon.
Well, life has moved along some more in the Hicks household: Andrew Frederick Hicks. Born in February to Randy and Jennifer and a joy to behold. Congratulations!
In that ever-mutating comedy we call ‘the internet’, fact and fiction mix all topsy-turvy, giving birth to new categories of information that have no name. Factoid? Fictionelle?
Recently, I noticed the above photo gracing the banner of the Harvey Mudd College Chemistry department’s web site. The site doesn’t name the student, and the HMC image archive refers to the file as ‘girl-in-chem-lab.jpg’, but I know her quite well. She is Reed chemistry senior, Hannah Allen ’14.
Hannah was a summer intern at HMC last summer. She has been back at Reed since the start of the school year and is currently trying to tie a bow on her thesis in atmospheric chemistry.
Who knows? We might get a summer intern from HMC one day. Portland summers are hard to beat.
