Kate Aubrecht ’92 moves to Saint Anselm

Posted on May 19, 2009 by alan

Kate Aubrecht, one of my very first thesis students, sent me some photos and news back in July 2007. Little did I know that our news blog would stop publication that same summer until a new computer system could be brought online. Here are her emails, almost two years later:

As many of you know, I am joining the faculty of Saint Anselm College in Manchester, NH this August. Barney, Thea, and I will all get to live in the same house all week. My new work email is kaubrecht@anselm.edu. We welcomed Thea (Althea Linden Grubbs-Aubrecht)in March. I interviewed at Saint Anselm in February. Although I will miss Holy Cross, single parenting during the week would be really hard. Barney got the good news of a positive tenure decision at Dartmouth this spring. Eventful year here. Bianca Sclavi ’92 should get photo credit for the close-up of Thea. She was visiting from Paris for a FASEB conference in Vermont and then visited us for the weekend.

KateAubrechtoutside.church07small.jpg

TheaAubrechtcloseup07small.jpg
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Kevan Shokat ’86 Elected to NAS

Posted on May 8, 2009 by alan

72 new members have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Among them is Kevan Shokat, Reed ’86, currently a professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, UC San Francisco.

Since this is the time of year when seniors are filing their finished theses, it is interesting to go back and look at Kevan’s. The Reed library catalog describes this document as “49 leaves” carrying the title, “Synthesis of a precursor of PRCPCP, a non-hydrolyzable analog of phosphoribosylpyrophosphate (PRPP)”. Ron McClard served as Kevan’s thesis advisor.

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Chemistry alumni win NSF graduate research fellowships

Posted on April 10, 2009 by alan

The National Science Foundation has begun releasing the names of the 2009 winners of its prestigious Graduate Research Fellowships in science. The first installment includes five Reedies, two of whom are Reed chemists: Justin Jasper ’05 and Joe Kliegman ’06.

Justin’s award will support environmental engineering studies at UC Berkeley, while Joe’s award was made for life sciences-biophysics studies at UC San Francisco. Other Reed awardees include: Adam Goldstein ’06, David Rasmussen ’07, and Leila Rieder ’06.

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Maggie Geselbracht chairs ACS symposium

Posted on April 10, 2009 by alan

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.”

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Seth Bush ’94 – Science Educator

Posted on January 27, 2009 by alan

The Education Forum in the Dec 19, 2008 issue of Science magazine presented an article titled, “THE PIPELINE: Science Faculty with Education Specialties” (p. 1795) by Seth and three colleagues in the California State University (CSU) system. The authors had conducted surveys of CSU science faculty to learn about their career dynamics and their relationship to science education.

Seth is currently an assistant professor in the chemistry department at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. On his About Me page, he describes himself as “a doting father” with a “crazy hard wired need to show off my kids”.

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I.O.N.i.C. goes hard-copy

Posted on January 10, 2009 by alan

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“.

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Eliot Chemistry Lab

Posted on January 2, 2009 by alan

Before the Scott chemistry building opened its doors in 1992, and even before the “old” chemistry building (the current home of the psychology department) was constructed in 1948, Reed chemistry labs occupied a privileged space under the eaves of Eliot Hall.

I was reminded of this history when I looked at the back cover of Supporters 2007-2008, an insert in the Autumn 2008 issue of the Reed magazine, and caught sight of a photo showing Reed students standing alongside a long lab bench. The dimly lit interior, rows of jars and upended bottles, and the shady outline of the Eliot roof literally “reeks” chemistry. Lab aprons appear to have a long history, but I can’t tell whether protective goggles were routinely worn in the era before World War II.

Eliot chemistry lab pre48.jpg

click on photo for full-size image

This low-resolution photo was generously provided courtesy of Special Collections, Eric V. Hauser Memorial Library, Reed College and may not be reprinted without permission.

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Alumni News from Autumn ’08 Reed Magazine

Posted on December 30, 2008 by alan

Some more news from the Class Notes section of the Autumn ’08 issue:

  • Barbara Ehrenreich ’63 has published a new book, This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation (Metropolitan Books, 2008) (p. 51)
  • Francis Oliver Whipple ’48 died on March 16 in Richmond, BC. He started Reed prior to WW II, then returned after the war to earn his BA in chemistry. An MS and a PhD in chemistry followed, both earned at Oregon State University. The magazine quotes him as having fallen “in love” with the humanities program at Reed. “I would have to say it was one of the highlights of my experience at Reed … I found that it influenced me a great deal in my later life. My attitude later became one – when I was a teaching assistant, when I was in graduate school – to encourage students to get a liberal education foremost, and a scientific education secondary. And I still believe that and I would certainly encourage any young person to do that.” (p. 56)
  • Francis F. Wong ’50 died on July 15 in Oakland, CA. Wong served as a medic during WW II and saw service on Omaha Beach on D-Day. After the war, he entered Reed and received a BA in chemistry. This was followed by more studies at University of Portland in organic biochemistry (MS ’51). Although he would work in research labs for the next 30 years, he was also a highly regarded photographer. Wong served as the official photographer for several Bay area fire departments, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley, and specialized in photos that revealed the details of fire suppression in the field. (p. 56)
  • Robert C. Brown ’51 died on August 2 in Danbury, CT. After completing his BA in chemistry at Reed, Brown studied law at George Washington University and University of Southern California (JD ’59). He subsequently moved to New York and spent the next 40 years as an intellectual property attorney and group patent attorney with the Union Carbide Corporation. (p. 57)
  • Carol Daun Croft ’57 died on June 21 in Tacoma, WA. Croft’s academic pursuits were many and eclectic. After she earned a BA in chemistry from Reed, she studied linguistics, theology, and then chemistry again (Oklahoma State University and Washington State University) and returned to Reed to work as a research assistant from 1963-66. (p. 57)
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Julia Chamberlin ’03 and Maggie Geselbracht share tattoos

Posted on December 30, 2008 by alan

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.

23 Mar 2016 update: Going through my old emails I came across the photo in question (and I learned that the Gordon Conference topic was Solid State Chemistry, a well-known haunt of Maggie’s). Julia and Maggie are standing in front of Maggie’s poster, and if you look carefully, you’ll see a pair of matching I.O.N.I.C. V.I.P.E.r. tattoos:

2008 JuliaMaggieVIPEr

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Julie Cheng ’84 & OneWorld Health

Posted on December 30, 2008 by alan

Julie was featured in a full page article in the Autumn 2008 issue of the Reed magazine, p. 36. The article described Julie’s work with the Institute for OneWorld Health, a nonprofit organization that “seeks out less-profitable drugs that others have abandoned, hoping to find cures for major diseases of the second and third world.” Current projects include developing a cheaper route to artemisinin, a highly prized antimalarial, and finding an antidiarrheal drug in an 800,000 compound library donated by the pharmaceutical giant, Roche. Although Julie’s work is mainly on the business and legal side, her Reed thesis title reveals her scientific background: “Reactions of benzalmethanedisulfonyl fluoride (2-phenyl-1, 1-ethenedisulfonyl fluoride)” (advisor: M. Cronyn).

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