O Chemistry, O Chemistry, Your Beakers Bright Delight Us

How do our students relieve stress during final exam week? By getting in the Christmas spirit as only a chemist could!

Instructor John Koellner passes away

On October 19 Instructor John Koellner passed away after 43 years at IU South Bend. Koellner was a valued member of our department and often taught multiple sections of the fall and spring semesters of the freshman chemistry laboratory classes C125 and C126. His passing was quite sudden after resigning from teaching at the start of this semester. Please visit the South Bend Tribune for Koellner's obituary and this blog for a recent profile. We miss you Koellner!

Student club helps local ACS section win award

The Biology-Chemistry Club at IU South Bend has organized and participated in many events over the past several years. In 2011 the club ran a science outreach program during National Chemistry Week (NCW) at the River Park Library aimed at showcasing science to children. Last year they repeated the event (click here for the story) with support from the Saint Joseph Valley Local Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Earlier this month the Saint Joseph Valley Local Section won the Outstanding Community Involvement in NCW award (click here for formal announcement) - one of five national awards. Justifying the award were (1) a presentation for 16 local schools, (2) a two-day "Science Spectacular" event, and (3) our students' outreach at the library. Congratulations to the Saint Joseph Valley Local Section and to the Biology-Chemistry Club for their efforts.

For 2013 National Chemistry Week falls on October 20-26. The theme is "Energy: Now and Forever" and naturally focuses on the application of chemistry to the goal sustainable energy. This year the Biology-Chemistry Club will work with a new student organization to continue their tradition. The River Park event is open to the public from 11:00 AM - 1:30 PM.

Professor Anderson Wins Teaching Award - Again!

In his first newsletter to the campus, new chancellor Terry Allison announced the winners of the 2013 IU Trustee's Teaching Awards, and Professor Gretchen Anderson was one of the recipients. Anderson's list of teaching awards is impressive (see her webpage) and is topped with the Herman Frederic Lieber Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence.

Anderson continually looks for innovation and alternatives in the classroom. Last year she experimented with a flipped classroom approach in her own biochemistry lecture and also arranged for video-conferencing with IU Bloomington so that our physical chemistry students could "sit in" on lectures down state while our own physical chemist was on sabbatical. Each fall her laboratory course in biochemistry deviates from a set of pre-planned experiments and simulates undergraduate research.

This isn't the first time that Anderson has won a Trustee's Teaching Award - and it surely won't be the last. Congratulations and thank you for being more than just a scientist who teaches, but rather a sincere and dedicated educator.

Nobel prize-winner comes to South Bend

Biologist Eric Wieschaus shared the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with two others "for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development" [NobelPrize.org]. Wieschaus was born in South Bend and we celebrate his return to our city and visit to our campus. Please mark your calendar for this exciting and rare event.  For more information about the speaker and the Bender Scholar in Residence Lecture program please visit the IU South Bend News Room.

Students return from summer REUs

Biochemistry major Ashley Compton and chemistry major Rachel Warrell just completed their first off-campus REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates).  Both have had extensive research experience on-campus but this was their first experience researching elsewhere giving them several opportunities, three of which are:

    (1)  A very LARGE line on their resumes and graduate school applications
    (2)  Exposure to large research institutes with graduate programs
    (3)  Summer income

If you are interested in a summer REU please contact a chemistry or biochemistry professor as soon as possible. These programs are very competitive so good grades and on-campus research experience are recommended.

A Tale of Two Sabbaticals

It was near this time last year when physical chemist Matt Marmorino (above left) began his Fall semester sabbatical to continue research in bounding the energies and other observables as well as learn some new material regarding quantum field theory in the hopes to extend his work to the relativistic realm. The first fruits of his work are just now appearing after first a semester of the work itself and then a semester of scientific review in the publication process. His manuscript in the Journal of Mathematical Chemistry compares two standard methods to find the lower bound of a system's ground-state energy and merges them into a single method to combine their advantages.

This Fall organic chemist Doug McMillen (above right) begins his research sabbatical. For the past several years McMillen has been filling voids in administration leaving him with less time for teaching and research. In Summer 2012 he resumed research by investigating new methods of oxidizing alcohols and other partially oxidized functional groups.  He plans to use his year-long sabbatical to complete and publish that work and start new work using elemental iodine to oxidize alcohols.  He also aims to develop collaborations and to prepare a research grant to support investigations of metal-catalyzed asymmetric oxidation of alkenes. We wish you a fruitful year, Professor McMillen.

Ready to meet new students!

Today all of the department's full-time faculty marched over to the Student Activity Center to greet chemistry, biochemistry, and pre-med students at the New Student Induction Ceremony. Sporting our department tee-shirts (left to right) are Professors Matt Marmorino (physical chemist), Gretchen Anderson (biochemist and chairperson), Doug McMillen (organic chemist on sabbatical), and Jake Plummer (visiting organic chemist). Also attending, but not pictured, were Professors Grace Muna (analytical chemist) and Bill Feighery (inorganic chemist).  We are all looking forward to the start of a wonderful new academic year. Go chemistry!

Record enrollment

Enrollment in the science-majors freshman chemistry course Fundamentals of Chemistry I CHEM C105 is the highest it has ever been.  With still one week before class starts there are 147 students enrolled in the course.  This huge load of students requires seven discussion sections.  And for every student enrolled in C105 there is likely one enrolled in the companion laboratory course C125.  While we aren't sure why the number of students has been rising steadily each year, we are going to assume it is because of the excellent instruction offered by Bill Feighery and Connie Fox, head instructors for C105 and C125, respectively, and the many supporting instructors for the discussion and laboratory sections. Our department had planned to make use of the large lecture hall in the new Education and Arts Building (pictured above), but our class is too large even for it; so we remain in Northside 113, the only room large enough. 

Welcome Professor Jake Plummer

Jake Plummer is our visiting professor of organic chemistry this year and will teach the lecture section and some laboratory sections this Fall and next Spring. Plummer earned a B.A. in Chemistry from Northwestern College (in Iowa) where he also picked up a B.A. in History and a minor in Religion. Plummer comes to us with several years of teaching experience from the Claremont Colleges (of California) and Greenville College (in Illinois).

Before obtaining his Ph.D. in Chemistry at Notre Dame in 2009 Plummer worked at Novartis Pharmaceuticals for eight months where he picked up valuable information about the industry side of chemistry.  Plummer also had a brief postdoctoral experience at Harvey Mudd College (in California).  In addition to his interests in history and religion as evidenced by his undergraduate record, Plummer is a martial arts aficionado and has studied almost as many fighting styles as there are functional groups in organic chemistry.  He also loves to spend time with his wife, newborn son, and two chihuahuas.  While Plummer is not new to Indiana we want to welcome him to IU South Bend and especially the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Labware donation from ETHOS Science Center

Many thanks to Patsy Boehler, executive director of the ETHOS Science Center in Elkhart, for inviting the IU South Bend science departments to sort through pallets full of pipet tips, boxes of bottles, and other assorted plastic labware and bring back whatever we wanted for our labs. Laboratory assistant Brend Beatty showcases our new supplies, still in boxes. Originally, over 100 pallets had been donated to ETHOS by one of their distributors, so they were able to give away beakers, graduated cylinders, culture tubes, and bottles to local high schools. Looking through the remaining items, the Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry departments came away with three small truckloads (and a trunkload) of supplies, including enough pipet tips to last several years!

ETHOS stands for Encouraging Technology and Hands-On Science with the goal to help children learn and love science. They offer curriculum, robotics programs (with and without LEGO), and summer camp along with many other events and resources.  Please visit their website for more information.

Professor Feighery "Makes History"

Inorganic Professor Bill Feighery's leadership and insight as chair of our department have been noted by colleagues across the college so much so that he was chosen this January to serve as Acting Associate Dean for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He will continue this duty, but now takes on an additional administrative role as chairperson once again.  However, this time he will chair the Department of History! Over the years, chemistry faculty have been asked to fill in administrative roles in other departments and colleges such as business and nursing; we now and history to that list. Current chairperson and historian Jonathan Nashel will be on sabbatical for the academic year researching in Washington, D.C. for his new book.

Distinguished Alumnus Mark Royer

In 2003 Mark C. Royer graduated from IU South Bend with honors earning a bachelor of science in chemistry. He made news last year when he began the Brian A. Zeider Scholarship for Excellence in Biochemistry at IU South Bend, in memory of his dear friend (and fellow volunteer in the Barefoot Doctors program) and undergraduate classmate who passed away suddenly in September 2011. Now on the 10th anniversary of his graduation he returns to receive the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award.   Here's why:

After graduating from IU South Bend, Dr. Royer continued schooling at the IU School of Medicine where was inducted into both the Alpha Omega Alpha Medical and the Gold Humanism Honor Societies.  He was also awarded the Pittman Scholarship for Surgical Excellence. After graduating with an MD in 2007, Dr. Royer began surgical training as an otolaryngologist, presented at various national conferences, and had multiple publications in the areas of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery, thyroid cancer, surgical anatomy, inner ear tumors, and the use of ultrasound in surgical practice. 

Dr. Royer was also involved with healthcare policy and advocated for improved quality of patient care and access to healthcare on Capitol Hill during multiple trips to Washington, DC. Additionally, he served as the American Academy of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery’s resident delegate to the American Medical Association.  He developed an interest in humanitarian medical missions during residency by training Myanmar village leaders to provide basic healthcare to their villages through the Barefoot Doctors program in northern Thailand.  In 2012 he repaired cleft lips and palates in Eldoret, Kenya at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital and plans to return in early 2014.  

Dr. Royer is now an otolaryngologist and surgeon at Witham Hospital in Lebanon, IN.  Refusing to believe that school has to end (at the 26^th grade so far for him), he plans to pursue a business of medicine MBA this Fall - at IU, of course.  Congratulations to Dr. Royer for this award and all of his achievements. We wish you continued success in all your endeavors.

Awards and Graduates 2013

It is beautiful weather for Commencement Day.  Four students will graduate as this academic year comes to a close: one chemistry and three biochemistry majors. Some will be looking for work while others will continue their studies. One graduate, Roxanne Sirhan, was featured in today's South Bend Tribune article.  

We also want to recognize those students who were awarded departmental scholarships or awards this year.  Congratulations to you for your excellent performance!

Zeider Excellence in Biochemistry Scholarship
   Joshua Strychalski
Chemical Rubber Company Chemistry Achievement Award
   Timothy Huneryager

George V. Nazaroff Scholarhip
   Rachel Warrell
Joseph H. Ross Seminar Award

   Roxanne Sirhan (graduating)

Student Excellence Award in Biochemistry
   Roxanne Sirhan (graduating)

2013 Undergraduate Research Conference

This year the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry was represented by several students in the poster presentation portion of the annual Undergraduate Research Conference. Michael Partridge (chemistry) and Holly Caparell (biology) displayed a poster titled "Electrochemical Analysis of Steroid Hormones in Water" that showcased their work under research supervisor analytical chemist Dr. Grace Muna. Rachel Warrell (chemistry) exhibited the poster "NIS Oxidation of Alcohols to Carbonyls" that detailed her summer experiemnts with organic chemist Dr. Doug McMillen. Ashley Compton (biochemistry) and Keith Steinkellner (biochemistry) presented the poster "Nested PCR Detection of X-Disease in Michigan Fruit Orchards" of work done with fellow student Michael Partridge. These three were supervised by biochemist Dr. Gretchen Anderson. Last, but not least, was the poster, "Development of a Biosensor for Diagnosis of Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus", shown by Roxanne Sirhan (biochemistry) who presented her summer work with colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago under a competitive REU award (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Congratulations to all these students for their quality presentations and the many hard hours of research that brought them here. 

  

Connie Fox wins the 2013 Campus Sustainability Award

As part of Earth Day's celebrations, Ms. Connie Fox will be presented with the 2013 Campus Sustainability Award at a campus reception April 22 for her tireless efforts in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.  Since 1984 she has served as the department's laboratory director and oversees the teaching labs (with some 300+ students every semester) and plays a critical role in the research labs of faculty. Her many responsibilities include ordering chemicals, updating inventory, and arranging for disposal of the chemicals. She is also in charge of laboratory safety, updating laboratory manuals, and routinely teaches laboratory and discussion sections for some of the freshman courses.  A few years ago Fox found a simple and cheap way to implement the new inventory system introduced by the division of chemical safety at IU Bloomington. This lets us easily keep track of what chemicals we already have so we can avoid duplication.

The following are examples of what Fox has done to deserve this award:

Reduce: Fox has scaled down experiments in our many freshman classes, especially those for non-science majors where qualitative and semi-quantitative analysis is often sufficient. Well-plates and droppers replace test tubes and burets without sacrificing results. Few experiments now deal with heavy metals and mercury thermometers are a thing of the past.

Reuse: Decades ago disposable equipment was all the rage. Now the attitude is reversed and cheaper disposable pipettes and droppers are reused to lessen waste. Rather than recycle emptied chemical bottles for their glass value, Fox keeps them on hand as free waste jars and disposal containers.

Recycle: Fox has organic chemistry students distill waste acetone to recover it for the next year. This has become a routine part of our teaching program and not only cuts costs and reduces waste, but instills in students the expectation that recycling is a central feature of any chemistry experiment.

Recover: Unfortunately (or fortunately), federal and state law prohibits the burning of chemical waste by schools to recover the heat energy stored within them. Otherwise, we are are sure Fox would find a way to take advantage of this final "R" in waste management!

Under Fox's initiatives we have not only reduced our landfills, but our lab costs as well. Thank you, Ms. Fox, not only for the efforts that led to this award, but your devotion to chemical safety and rigorous instruction. To say that our department would be at a loss without you is an understatement - our department could not function without you!

IU South Bend hosts the 2013 Chemistry Olympiad

The Chemistry Olympiad is a yearly event sponsored by the American Chemistry Society that begins at thousands of high schools and ends in an international competition. This year IU South Bend is holding one of the many national exams in which only two students per high school can compete.  

The twenty best students from all over the nation will study together at a summer camp and then the top four will go to the 45th international competition at Moscow State University. Students spent the morning taking written exams on campus, took a break for lunch, and finished with a practical exam in the laboratory in the afternoon. Laboratory supervisor Connie Fox and assistant Brenda Beatty prepared instruments, equipment, and chemicals for the competitors who were overseen by coordinator Douglas Sisk from Marian High School.   More information about the competition can be found at the American Chemical Society webpages.

New FT-IR Spectrometer

With the gradual decay of two older Fourier-Transform Infrared (FT-IR) spectrometers, our department eagerly welcomes the newest addition to our suite of instruments.  The Cary 630 FT-IR spectrometer is equipped with three accessories that can be interchanged in less than a minute. The first is a standard transmission module that is pictured to the right with a gas cell. The second, in the middle of the photograph, is a diffuse reflectance accessory that obviously allows analysis of reflected, rather than transmitted, light.  Finally there is a diamond attenuated total reflectance (ATR) module, that also relies on reflection. This   accessory is shown attached to the main body of the instrument.  Details on the spectrometer and each accessory can be found at Agilent's websites:

Instrument brochure:

Cary 630 FT-IR

Accessory brochures:

Transmission accessory

Diffuse reflectance accessory

Diamond ATR accessory

The George V. Nazaroff Scholarship

Congratulations are in order for Rachel Warrell, a junior chemistry major, winner of this year's George V. Nazaroff Scholarship. Rachel has already received much attention on our blog, first as the 2010 recipient of the freshman Chemical Rubber Company Achievement Award (while she was a senior in high school) - and more recently as the 2012 winner of a summer SMART grant.  It was high time we advertised the winners of this scholarship and began doing so this year with the plaque held by both Rachel and Professor Emeritus George V. Nazaroff that will hang in the chemistry hallway.

George Nazaroff received his Ph.D. in 1965 from the University of Wisconsin, trained as a theoretical and computational chemist. He then served as professor of chemistry at Michigan State University for six years where he graduated two Ph.D. students. Next he began his teaching career at IU South Bend as chair of the department. Nazaroff was the original physical chemist on our campus and with others he introduced honors sections for the freshman general chemistry sequence and courses in essential oils and aromatherapy. Though others had been department chair during his tenure, he returned to this duty at the end of his career. Nazaroff retired in 2002 and in his honor his colleagues set up this scholarship in his name. Because his efforts at IU were well-known, outside funds poured in to fund the scholarship.

Several years ago Nazaroff came out of retirement to teach part time as an adjunct professor for us.  He is noted for his unique and rigorous approach in the freshman course CHEM C101 Elementary Chemistry for non-science majors.  Public comments on his teaching of this course include ...

   "He is willing to do whatever it takes to help you understand the work ..."

   "Nazaroff was willing to come in on days off and help for hours ..."

   "He has a genuine interest in helping his students pass."

   "He was extremely helpful and made chemistry fun!"

Professor Nazaroff will be honored on April 18 for his five years of service as an adjunct professor after his retirement.  We hope he will continue teaching for our department for many years to come.

The first George V. Nazaroff Scholarship was awarded in 2005 and Rachel is the eighth student to be honored.  Rachel shares with Nazaroff some of the traits mentioned by students above as evidenced by her diligent work as a chemistry tutor for our department. She plans to attend graduate school and has expressed an interest to become a professor. Congratulations again, Rachel! We are looking forward to an excellent senior year with you.

Student Roxanne Sirhan Wins Volunteer Award

Senior biochemistry major Roxanne Sirhan and two other students were honored Wednesday with the Women Helping Women: Honoring Student Volunteer Leaders Award given by Women's Philanthropy Council of Indiana University.  First Lady (of the university) Laurie McRobbie presented the award during a luncheon. Sirhan was honored for her volunteer work at Memorial Hospital and $250 was given to the hospital in her honor.  The full story, with photograph, is available at Indiana University Foundation Newsroom. Please visit the Women's Philanthropy Council Facebook page for more information about this IU organization.

Two talks by Grace Muna

A few weekends ago when others were finishing up their spring break, Professor Muna gave a presentation at PITTCON, the annual Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy.  In the oral session of the bioanalytical presentations (electrochemisty subsection) she offered recent work completed at IU South Bend with the help of undergraduate students Michael Partridge (chemistry major) and Holly Garner (biology major). The talk was titled "Amperometric Detection of Estrogenic Phenolic Compounds at a Nickel Modified Glassy Carbon Electrode" 

Just last Friday, a much less technical talk was delivered by Muna to fellow faculty on campus as one of the Dean's Seminars for this semester. She first reviewed the source and problems of the environmental estrogens and then described how she used electrochemistry and separation techniques to isolate and identify such compounds in our waters.

Faculty Focus - John Koellner

Instructor John Koellner has been in our department part-time since 1970 which means he has been teaching here longer than all of the full-time faculty. He typically instructs some of the freshman general chemistry laboratory sections for science majors and we are very grateful for his long record of excellent service. Koellner earned three degrees from the University of Notre Dame: BS chemistry, MA teaching, and MS chemistry. 

Several years ago he retired from teaching high-school chemistry in the South Bend schools, mostly at Riley High School, after 42 years - which means he now has more time for us! Before retiring, and for a few years after, it was not uncommon for some of our freshman to have their previous high-school teacher as their current laboratory instructor. Koellner also helped out Notre Dame in their organic chemistry labs for 10 years and has supported many efforts directed to high-school chemistry such as (1) being a reader for AP chemistry exams, (2) instructing at the AP Institute at St. Mary’s College, (3) serving as the regional coordinator for Chemistry Olympiads, and (4) participating in a Howard Hughes sponsored summer research program for high school science teachers. Thanks again for all you do, Instructor Koellner. We are looking forward to many more years of your expertise in the lab.

Research Published After Graduation

Though we experience it more often (actually constantly) than electrical or magnetic forces, gravity is the weakest of these three forces.  There are still other forces at work in nature, and faculty and students at IU South Bend are working with many other scientists from several nations to detect and learn about WIMPS - a particular type of particle that doesn't feel the stronger of these forces.  

These Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) are hypothetical as no one has yet detected them.  Physicists postulate that they play a role in the supposed dark matter of the our universe.  These mysterious particles are hard to detect because they have no electrical or magnetic properties and thus interact through only weaker forces, like gravity.  

Last year we announced that chemistry graduates Joshua Benkhe and Adam Grandison were both to be acknowledged in a paper for their collaborative work with the IU South Bend Department of Physics and Astromony under the supervision of physicist Ilan Levine. That work is now published as Constraints on Low-Mass WIMP Interactions on ¹⁹F from PICASSO, Physics Letters B 711 (2012) 153-161. 

More recently a paper that Joshua Benkhe actually coauthored has been published: First dark matter search results from a 4-kg CF₃I bubble chamber operated in a deep underground site, Physical Review D 86, 052001 (2012). We are very proud of all our students who participate in undergraduate research and congratulate Benkhe and Grandison for their hard work. For addition information about student research in this collaborative effort between chemistry and physics please see our earlier post.

What runs on air but burns four times hotter than lava?

Agilent's 4100 Microwave Plasma - Atomic Emission Spectrometer, or MP-AES for short. This instrument essentially replaces our [very] old Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. Our new MP-AES is well-suited for detecting metal ions in water samples.  It first filters air into a stream of pure nitrogen and then blasts it with microwaves that transform the gas into a plasma of electrons and ions to produce something like a very hot flame. Into this plasma we send an aerosol from a water sample and the metal ions that were present in the water are excited electronically and decay to the ground state by emitting light of different wavelength. The different wavelengths indicate which metals are present in the water sample, and the intensity of the light indicates their concentration. The nitrogen generator is the white box on the floor that is fed by purified and dehydrated air (note the pipes and pressure gauges by the wall). Chemistry students will have the opportunity to use the MP-AES as early as their freshman year.

Please click here for a link to a short video presentation of the MP-AES that describes the basic ideas and engineering of the main instrument and the nitrogen generator. 

Get SMART ... and get experience with a paycheck!

What will you do this summer?

(A)  Find a job to pay for tuition and rent.
(B)  Research in a professor's lab.
(C)  Lounge around at the pool.
(D)  A and B by day - C by night
.

There exist paid research opportunities for undergraduates at many schools that allow you to earn experience and money.  Schools are able to do this because the research may be supported by various grants that allocate funds for attracting students to research careers. Also such an experience can serve as a recruitment tool for that college or university.  Even IU South Bend, without graduate programs in the physical sciences, has paid research positions during the summer funded by SMART grants.  If this interests you then act immediately: (1) find a professor of chemistry, biology, physics, math, or computer science that is willing to have you research with them; (2) develop a research project suitable for one summer's work; and (3) submit an official application.  Click here for more information.

Visiting Organic Professor Sought

Professor McMillen is still acting as Dean of the College of Health Sciences so our department is in need of an instructor for the sophomore organic chemistry lectures.  This is a large and important class taken by chemistry majors, biology majors, and students aiming for medical school regardless of their degree program, if any. Our department is conducting a national search for a one-year visiting organic professor to fill the vacancy.  Who will be the new professor - the one with prior teaching experience (left model), the one with industrial research experience (right model), or someone else entirely? This position has been advertised in publications such as Chemical and Engineering News.  Please click here for the university advertisement.

Get Ready for Senior Seminars

What do engineers and chemists have in common? The need to give clear and informative presentations. This skill is a must for our senior students who each will write a report and give an oral presentation this semester about a current research topic. Dr. Betty Lise Anderson, an engineer and professor from The Ohio State University, returns to share her secrets for a terrific technical talk to the seminar students.  One lucky student will be awarded the Joseph H. Ross Seminar Award for their efforts.

Professor Feighery Serves as Assistant Dean

It has been a year and a half since Professor Feighery stepped down as chair of our department, but during this past winter break he made a New Year resolution to get back into administration.  Earlier this month Feighery started his new position as Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  As this is a position that Professor McMillen held for a while, it seems clear that our university knows where to find capable administrators. But no need to worry, students, this position is only part-time so you will still enjoy his expertise in courses such as the inorganic chemistry lecture and laboratory.