Undergraduates, graduate students, and post-docs in the Department of Chemistry doing research in areas relating to the biomedical or pharmaceutical sciences, especially synthetic organic chemistry and related fields, are invited to submit abstracts for posters for presentation at a special session on the evening of Thursday, April 2 from 4:30pm-6:30pm. Posters will remain on display throughout the day of the Miller Symposium, Friday, April 3 from 8am-5:30pm.

Applications are also being accepted for the 2009 R. Bryan Miller Undergraduate Award, and the 2009 R. Bryan Miller Summer Graduate Fellowship.

The deadline for all poster abstracts and award applications is Friday, February 27, 2009.

Visit the Miller Symposium webpage and download the following PDF for more information:
2009 Miller Application Information

Edwin Friedrich, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry, has written a timeline of the early history of the UC Davis Department of Chemistry up to 1944 that was selected for the College of L&S Centennial 100 Stories website. Here is a link to this historical timeline:
http://www.ls.ucdavis.edu/centennial/stories.aspx?storyId=38

In the near future Professor Friedrich also hope to expand the history to the post-World War II years from 1945 to about 1975.

Let’s congratulate Prof. Alex Navrotsky for winning the 2009 Roebling Medal to be given by the Geological Society of America Meeting in Fall 2009. This is the highest honor given by the Mineralogical Society of America.

Check out today’s C & E News cover story. It is a nice showcase about Carlito and his team’s research work! Their research was also featured in the Sacramento Bee last week. Congratulations, Carlito and the Lebrilla group!

http://pubs.acs.org/cen/coverstory/86/8639cover.html
http://www.sacbee.com/101/story/1249011.html

As the new graduate students arrive and the quarter is about to begin, the party to welcome this year’s incoming graduate students is rapidly approaching. Mark your calenders for Friday, September 26th (from 5:30-8:30pm)! Please sign-up in Chem 125 if you are planning to attend.

The department has won two nice awards this week:

Matt Siebert, a graduate student with Prof. Dean Tantillo, has just won an ACS Organic Division Graduate Fellowship.

Prof. Kevin Smith, an emeritus professor, has been awarded the American Chemical Society’s Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic and Bioorganic Chemistry for 2009.

Congratulations to them both!

I’m going to start a blog so that I can communicate with you some of the things currently going on in the department. I hope this will shed more light into some of the issues and happenings around the department. I haven’t yet decided what direction to go and how much of this to make personal or even how often I’ll add an entry. I’m hoping this will evolve organically, not in an alkane or hydrocarbon kind of way, but perhaps more in a neural network kind of way.

As many of you know, George Hague has recently retired as our MSO. We will miss George greatly and his experience and optimism, but he won’t be totally gone. He will still be in the building helping Prof. Gervay-Hague’s research.

We have a new MSO arriving Sept. 2nd. Susan Olton comes to us from Chemical Engineering. She has considerable experience in this position and we hope her large knowledge base, particularly in navigating through the UC administration, will be quite useful. Let’s all welcome Susan!