SPECIAL SEMINAR-Alumni Peter Jarowski
Tuesday January 27th, 2009 at 12:30 PM, 1003 Silver Center
SPEAKER: Dr. Peter Jarowski
Laboratorium fur Organische Chemie
Eidgenossiche Technische Hochschule (ETH)
Zurich, Switzerland
Peter graduated from NYU in 2003, completed his Ph. D. with Ken Houk at UCLA in 2007 and is now a postdoctoral fellow with Francois Diederich at the ETH
Revised Title : "Power of the Acetylenic Functional Group:
Advanced Organic Materials - Strained, Conjugated and Polarized Triple Bonds"
Al Meyers Symposium
There will be a symposium honoring distinguished NYU Chemistry alumnus Al Meyers at Colorado State University on Saturday, October 25, 2008. For more information, click www.chem.colostate.edu/AIMsymposium.
Albert I. Meyers (22 November 1932-23 October 2007) was an American organic chemistry, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Colorado State University, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
Born in New York City, Meyers earned undergraduate and doctoral degrees from New York University in 1954 and 1957, respectively. After finishing his graduate degree, Meyers worked as a research chemist for a year before joining the faculty of Louisiana State University as an associate professor. He rose to the rank of full professor in 1964, and was a special NIH fellow at Harvard University in 1965-1966. Meyers later moved to Wayne State University in 1970 and finally to Colorado State University in 1972.
Meyers has served on the editorial boards and staff of several major chemical journals, including the Journal of the American Chemical Society. For his work in the area of synthetic organic chemistry, particularly in synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, Meyers was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1994. An endowed faculty chair at Colorado State in synthetic organic chemistry and Meyers Synthesis is named in honor of Meyers.
Alumna Andrea Holmes receives NSF Grant
Kudos to NYU Chemistry alumna Andrea Holmes, who is an assistant professor of chemistry at Doane College, on receiving a major competitive research grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The grant provides $105,000 per year, up to $525,000 over five years, based on acceptable progress and the availability of funds.
Professor Holmes' grant award comes through the NSF Division of Chemistry as well as the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, which is NSF's most prestigious award in support of the early career-development activities of teacher-scholars who integrate research and education at their institutions. The proposed projects are reviewed according to the same scientific standards as other research projects funded through the National Science Foundation.
Professor Holmes will begin a new phase of her research program to develop chemical sensors that change color in the presence of abused narcotics within a liquid or other substance. After having success in detecting the presence of flunitrazepam (sometimes called the "date-rape drug"), she and her students will use the grant to develop other macromolecular color sensors to detect drugs such as cocaine and methamphetamine. Eventually, the research project could contribute to future drug-detection tools for forensic scientists. A scientific abstract of Dr. Holmes' project, titled "CAREER: Design of Colorimetric and Chiroptical Sensors for Abused Narcotics," is available at the NSF Web site.
At the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans next April, Professor Holmes and seven of her students will present their findings. In 2006 her work earned international media attention and a spot among 11 teams of finalists in the National Collegiate Inventors Competition in Washington, D.C.
Alumnus Phil Baran receives National Fresenius Award
| Phil Baran, Chemistry Department alumnus, received the 2007 National Fresenius Award from ACS. This honor is presented annually to a faculty member under the age of 35 at the time of nomination. The honor recognizes high scholarship and original investigations in chemistry. Baran received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from NYU where he worked with Professor David Schuster. At age 18, Baran authored a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on porphyrin-fullerin hybrid synthesis which, according to Schuster, "opened up a completely new area of research in my lab". At age 29, Baran is currently an Associate Professor at Scripps Research Institute. He joins a prestigious group of Fresenius Award recipients, including Martin Karplus, Ronald Breslow, Mostafa El Sayed, Nicholas Turro and Roald Hoffman. The complete award announcement appears in the January 1st edition of C&E News. |
NYU Alumnus Irving Sunshine dies at age 90
As reported in the C&EN obituaries this month, Irving Sunshine, passed away on June 14th, 2006 at age 90. Dr. Sunshine recieved his B.S. from New York University in 1937, his M.A. in 1941 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1950. Sunshine was the chief toxicologist at the Cuyahoga County Coronor's Office in Cleveland, a professor of toxicology and clinical pharmacology at Case Western Reserve's School of Medicine as well as a toxicologist at the University Hospitals of Cleveland until his retirement in 1985.
Sunshine earned many awards and had three separate toxicology and forsensic organizations establish awards in his name. He wrote over 20 books and served on multiple advisory committees. He helped establish the Cleveland Poison Prevention Center and directed the center for 24 years and was president of the American Association of Poison Control Centers from 1966 to 1968.
NYU Alumnus Edward Stiefel passes away
NYU alumnus Edward Stiefel passed away, from pancreatic cancer, in New Brunswick, New Jersey on September 4, 2006. He was 64 years old. He is survived by his wife, Jeannette, and daughter Karen Hoerhold, her husband, Udo, and their two sons.
After receiving his bachelor's degree from New York University in 1963, Stiefel earned his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1967. He taught for seven years at the State University of New York-Stony Brook, then served as an investigator and senior investigator at the Charles F. Kettering Research Laboratory. In 1980, he joined Exxon as a research associate. Over the next 21 years, he became a senior research associate, scientific adviser and senior scientific adviser. He was a scientific architect of the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, applying the principles of bioinorganic chemistry and microbiology to this large-scale environmental remediation project. He also was the inventor of the commercially important "thiomolybdate" additive for lubricating oils. After retiring from ExxonMobil, Stiefel joined the faculty of Princeton University in 2001 as the Ralph W. Dornte Lecturer, where he was affiliated with the Princeton Environmental Institute, in addition to the chemistry department. His research interests included the bioinorganic, coordination and environmental chemistry of transition metal ions.
Stiefel held 30 U.S. patents and published more than 150 scientific articles. His review article on "The Coordination and Bioinorganic Chemistry of Molybdenum" has been cited in more than 800 publications. He was co-editor with Harry Gray, Joan Valentine and Ivano Bertini of the recently published book "Biological Inorganic Chemistry." He was a member of the board of reviewing editors of Science magazine, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a winner of the American Chemical Society Award in Inorganic Chemistry in 2000. He was founding co-chair of the Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes Gordon Conference (with Russ Hille) in 1999 and of the Inaugural Gordon Research Conference on Environmental Bioinorganic Chemistry (with François Morel) in 2002.
