Chemistry News

Many years ago my wife and I published an article together in J. Chemical Education. Little did I know that one of the nagging consequences of that article would be setting people straight when they incorrectly listed me as first author. Constance Bailey ’10 and her spouse Johnathan Brantley may have successfully dodged this problem. They recently published Mechanobiochemistry: harnessing biomacromolecules for force-responsive materials as a review article in Polymer Chemistry (2013), DOI: 10.1039/c3py00001j. They have different last names (although the names do sound a little alike) and Johnathan is listed as the first author, Constance as the second. You can look at their photos, read about their research interests at U. Texas-Austin, and maybe figure out how scientists in two different labs teamed up on a review article by checking the article’s front page.

No doubt the Beatles wish they had written this memorable line, but it was destined to become the chemistry thesis title of Josh Vaughan ’00.

After finishing his thesis with Prof. Dan Gerrity, Josh went off to MIT to earn a PhD in 2005. He is currently (since 2008) enjoying the fruits of a Burroughs Wellcome Career Award at the Scientific Interface, and this July he will be joining the Chemistry faculty (and fellow Gerrity thesis student, Prof. Daniel Gamelin ’90) at the University of Washington as an assistant professor.

Judging from the titles of recent publications, we anticipate that he will study something connected with fluorescence.

Just as I was leaving the building in mid-December with a stack of final exams to grade, an email rolled in from Kris McNeill ’92 (Professor of Enviromental Chemistry, ETH):

“I am happy to announce that our son Bosco Sturla McNeill was born today (12/12/12) at 12:55 pm.  6.6 lbs, 19.5 inches (3000 g, 49.5 cm).  Everybody here is doing great.”

Here’s a picture of Bosco and Kris:

Philip Wilk, ’95, sent us an email this morning in which he wrote: “I have some new digs. I took a new job with the Department of Energy in April 2011. I run the Heavy Element Chemistry research program for the Office of Basic Energy Sciences. I am focused primarily on the actinides. I am working fairly closely with programs in the national labs, as well as a bunch of universities. I miss California, but there are many wonderful things happening here in DC. I noticed a new name on the shingle outside the reactor facility; I hope the reactor program is healthy and strong.”

You can learn more about Phil’s new position and the Heavy Element Chemistry program by following the links. Phil’s interest in heavy and super-heavy elements (the ones that keep getting added to the end of the periodic table) dates at least as far back as his graduate student days at UC Berkeley, and he was an energetic part of Reed’s reactor team in the early 90’s.

Those who shared a Chem 201/202 conference with Cheyenne back in 1999-2000 probably remember how she would often spend the last minutes of each session roving the room, looking for other students to talk chemistry with. Apparently that interest in teaching has persisted. Now that she has completed a PhD in organic chemistry at Stanford in 2009, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard, Cheyenne has joined the chemistry faculty at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticutt.

Every Reed chemist must eventually ask herself, “What can I cook next? What can possibly compare with the awesome laboratory experiences of synthetic chemistry?”

If your inclinations run towards the production of great-tasting food then one answer might be to find some way of sharing your talents with Portland’s eating public. At least, that’s the answer that Alice Newton ’11 has found.

Barely one year outside of Reed, and with several bagel recipes practiced and perfected, Alice has just opened Alice’s Bagels at the Good Food Here pod at 4262 SE Belmont. You can read more about how Alice got her start and what’s on the menu by visiting here.

One problem facing malaria patients is “resistance,” the ability of the malaria parasite to fend off traditional antimalarial drugs. Another problem is the limited availability/expense of newer, more potent antimalarials, like (+)-artemisinin, that can overpower resistant parasites.

An important step forward in the fight against malaria has just been taken by Prof. Silas Cook ’99 and his research team at Indiana University. They have recently published a new “five pot” sequence that begins with a simple inexpensive compound, cyclohexenone, and ends with gram-quantities of artemisinin (research article: J. Am. Chem. Soc. DOI: 10.1021/ja3061479).

Silas describes their achievement this way, “All of the building blocks needed for this synthesis are exceptionally cheap and available on a metric-ton scale,” Cook says. “Is this chemistry ready for supplying the world with artemisinin? No. But with some further reaction engineering, it very well could be.”