Two Upcoming Deadlines/Events

Hi DePaul Chemistry and Biochemistry Students, Alumni, families and Friends,

Thanks to those who donated on the BlueDemonChallenge Day! Your gifts unlocked a bigger gift to the department. If you missed the day but want to support the department, you can donate funds here to “The Fund for Chemistry”. This money is used to support our efforts to help our students, such as helping cover costs to go to conferences, etc (see below). Donate at this link by clicking “view all giving opportunities” and searching chemistry to find the Fund for chemistry, as shown in this image:

Also, A few things to put on your calendars:

1. If you are a student or alumni who has/had a CSH instructor you think is doing a fantastic job, nominate them by Monday for the CSH excellence in teaching award! Faculty and staff can also nominate instructors. Here’s a flier with a QR code. It’s due Feb 10th

2. On February 13th the department will have a lab open house on the 3rd floor of McGowan south (and one lab on the 4th floor) where students can come and check out the research different folks are doing and chat about how to get into research It will Feb 13th from noon-2pm. Put it on your calendars!

3. We will have a seminar on Feb 19th by a professor from Duquesne to talk about their organic chemistry research. Keep an eye out for fliers as we got closer to the event! Here’s who the speaker will be: https://www.duq.edu/faculty-and-staff/thomas-montgomery.php

3. The Chem club is finalizing getting funds to send some students to ACS spring in San Diego, if you are a alumni or family/friend who is going the ACS, keep an eye out for our students! You can also email chemistry@depaul.edu with you info and we can share it with the students so you can meet up there.

Here’s the link to the meeting: https://www.acs.org/meetings/acs-meetings/spring.html

4. Another, more local conference is coming in June: the ACS Great Lakes Regional Meeting in Appleton Wisconsin. The due date to submit abstracts is March 1st and we might have faculty or students go to that. Here’s the link to the meeting: https://greatlakesregion-acs.org/event-welcome/glrm-2025. Appleton, WI is a 3h drive from Chicago, which isn’t that bad.

As always, alumni and friends of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, we love to hear from you and would love for you to come back and give a talk about your career trajectory and useful lessons for our students! Also, alumni can join our discord server for faculty, staff, students and alumni to stay connected with the department. We often share opportunities we get in our inboxes on there like summer workshops or research opportunities, etc. Here’s a discord invite link: https://discord.gg/gYT8Juk

Take care of yourselves and we will see you around! And again, thank you so much for your support during the Blue Demon Challenge!

Sincerely,

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Help Send our Students to ACS Philly 2020!

Hello DePaul Students, Alumni, and Friends,

Between the costs of registration, lodging, and travel, going to conferences is expensive! While faculty can usually find funding to go to one conference a year or so, sending a group of students is usually prohibitively expensive. This is really unfortunate because going to a conference is such a transformative professional development experience for young chemists.

Therefore, we set up a crowdfunding site through “Inspire DePaul”, the DePaul University crowdfunding platform, to send 5 students to the American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting in Philadelphia in March 2020. The ACS meeting is a HUGE (ca. 15000 chemists) 5-day event. The students would be presenting their research in posters or talks, and their faculty adviser (Dr. Grice) would go to and advise them on how to get the most out of the experience. These students have never been to an ACS meeting before and in addition to presenting, would be able to network, learn cutting-edge chemistry, and immerse themselves in the global chemistry community.

You can help us make this happen by donating to their campaign

The campaign starts today and goes for a month. Donations are gifts to DePaul and so you get a gift receip. Funds only go towards supporting the students going to the conference. If you know someone who would be interested in supporting students as they grow as professional scientists, pass this on! Let’s get these students to Philly for ACS in the Spring of 2020!

Thank you for your help!

Undergraduate Research Showcase on November 8th

Are you a CSH undergrad who has done research here at DePaul? Talk to your advisor about presenting your work at Showcase! You can present a poster or give a talk on what you have been doing. The showcase will be November 8th, and a call for posters and talks will be out soon. Mark your calendars and we look forward to seeing you there. Every year we have many students who have done research in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry present their work!

Spring Quarter Conference Recaps

DePaul Chemistry and Biochemistry students and faculty have been attending and presenting at conferences this spring.

Professor Southern and two student research assistants, Jenna Henning and Kirsten Kochan, attended the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, MD from March 2 – 6, 2019. They presented a poster entitled “Structural Studies of the Fc Region of Murine Immunoglobulin G Antibodies Using Single Molecule FRET.” In this study they compared the structure of the Fc region of antibodies from mice and humans. They removed the sugars typically bound in this region, which are required for the antibodies to generate an immune response, then attached dye molecules and obtained single molecule FRET histograms of the antibody structures present. The human antibodies had a narrower range of conformations after sugar removal than the antibodies from mice. (Photos below.)

DePaul Chemistry Father and Son at the ACS Meeting in August 2018

On Tuesday, August 21 DePaul University Chemistry Department alumnus Dr. Michael Kharas met with his father, our very own Professor Gregory Kharas at the 256th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in Boston. Michael gave an invited talk entitled “Towards therapeutic targeting of the MUSASHI RNA binding protein network” in the morning at a Biology Division. His father’s work was presented by two posters on “Synthesis and styrene copolymerization of novel trisubstituted ethylenes” at the ACS Polymer Chemistry Division session in the evening. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Employees Bill and Sara also presented the posters. Both received their MS degrees from working in Dr. Greg Kharas’s lab at DePaul and currently coordinate lab preparation, safety, instrumentation maintenance, and TA hiring and management for our Department.

Dr. Michael Kharas is an Associate Member of Molecular Pharmacology, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Associate Professor Weill Cornell Pharmacology Graduate Program, New York. If you are curious about his research, here is a link to his lab. We are proud to have him an as Alumnus and we hope that our current students look to him and our other alumni as resources when they consider the next steps in their careers.

Also, if you are a student researcher, you should definitely consider going to a conference! There will be several upcoming opportunities, including CAURS the the Great Lakes Regional ACS Meeting. Talk to your research adviser about it well in advance to start planning.

DePaul Faculty Go to #ACSNOLA

Part of doing science is communicating your results in both written and oral form. Towards this end, DePaul faculty travel to conferences to present the work they’ve done with students here in the department of chemistry and biochemistry.

This spring break, The American Chemical Society has it’s 255th National Meeting and Exposition in New Orleans.

Both Dr. Grice and Dr. Vadola will be presenting, and a poster by one of Dr. Griffin’s Collaborators is also being presented.

Dr. Grice is giving a talk on carbon dioxide reduction research performed with DePaul undergraduates. Here’s the abstract. 

Dr. Vadola is giving a talk on gold-catalyzed C-C coupling reaction research he has been performing with DePaul undergraduates. Here’s the abstract. 

Here’s the abstract to the poster by Dr. Griffin’s collaborators. Dr. Grice’s collaborator at RFUMS is also giving a poster based on the DePaul-RFUMS collaborative work, see here.

If you want to hear about what happens at the ACS meeting, you can follow the hashtag #ACSNOLA on twitter.

Also, if you are a student researcher and want to go to a conference, you should definitely find a way to do so! They are great experiences for learning about science, practicing science communication, networking with peers, and learning about potential career information. Talk to your research advisor well in advance and you might be able to find a way to fund the trip. The ACS Great Lakes Regional Meeting 2019 will be in Lisle, IL, and will be much cheaper than a ACS National meeting, so it should be fairly easy to attend. There are also many other options out there, so keep your eyes out and talk to your research advisor!

Undergrads, Present your Research at CAURS!

 

Every spring, the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS) is held at a location in Chicago and undergraduates from DePaul, IIT, U of Chicago, Northwestern, Loyola, and Roosevelt Universities present posters and talks.

Here’s the website for CAURS.

This year, we are delighted that CAURS will be held at DePaul in our student center. The event is all day April 15th, 2018. Put it on your calendar!

It’s free and everyone is welcome, but registration is required for all attendees. Undergraduates, if you would like to present, talk to your research advisor and then submit your information by March 31. If you would like to go and see the posters and talks but do not want to present, register as an observer. Faculty and graduate students can register to be judges if they would like to get involved beyond just being an observer.

Students get valuable experience presenting their work, networking with peers, and seeing what kinds of research is being done by undergraduates around the Chicagoland area. In addition, several awards are given out for the best posters and talks.

We hope to see you all there!

 

Connections to the Chicago Area

In our last post, we talked about research collaborations between DePaul Faculty and other researchers around the US and the World. In this post, we wanted to focus in to the city of Chicago and local areas. Part of DePaul’s mision is to engage Chicago and use the resources of this great city in our teaching and research, and the Chemistry Department is no exception!

We  have a strong connection to our local community here in the city of Chicago. Below are some highlights of recent and current programs.

• Dr. Kyle Grice does outreach at DePaul Prep, a private Catholic high school in the area. He is also ACS Science coach, working with a local high school chemistry teacher. Through this program, the high school program received funding for supplies and equipment, and Dr. Grice also provides guidance and feedback on lab experiments.

 

• Dr. Graham Griffin recently published a paper on excitonic delocalization in organic photovoltaics, in collaboration with co-authors at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jpcc.6b11332).

 

• Dr. Timothy French has launched a “Discover Chicago” course (incoming first year students take Discover or Explore Chicago courses in ther first quarter) entitled “Chicago: Food, Science, and Society”. The course will run as part of the Pathways Honors program in the coming fall quarter. Dr. French also works with the Von Steuben Metropolitan Science Center, a CPS high school in the North Park neighborhood. He works with them on judging science fairs and preparing their science Olympiad team.

 

• Several faculty members collaborate with researchers at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science (RFUMS). These projects also involve DePaul student researchers working on the projects.

 

• DePaul chemistry students go to the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS) every year to present their research. If you are a student, consider going next year!

Cesar Saucedo wins 1st Place Oral Presentation at LSAMP Conference

We found out recently that Cesar Saucedo, a Junior Chemistry major, won 1st place in Oral presentations at the Louise Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) spring symposium in STEM. Cesar’s talk was titled “Electrochemical Behavior of Group 6 Metal Carbonyls for CO₂ Reduction.”  Congratulations Cesar!

LSAMP is an organization that supports minority participation in Science and Technology, and they can fund students performing research in chemistry. They have a yearly spring symposium where students from several Illinois colleges and universities come to present their research in the form of posters and oral presentations. If you are interested in being involved in the LSAMP program at DePaul, contact Victoria Simek at the STEM center.

Upcoming Conferences

Although Chicago is a big city, we don’t often have a lot of chemistry conferences in Chicago for students to attend (the ACS National Meeting hasn’t been in Chicago for a long time, but it will be back in 2022). However, there are opportunities out there. We wanted to let you know about some upcoming conference opportunities in Chicago.

In April, the annual Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS)  will be hosted by Roosevelt University. It’s on Saturday April 29th, and registration is free. Students from DePaul present every year and you should talk to your research advisor about giving a poster or oral presentation. If you haven’t given a poster presentation at a conference, this is a very good place to do it the first time. You need to register with an abstract online, and the last day to do so is March 31st. We hope to see you there!

Pittcon is coming to Chicago March 5-9 at McCormick Place. Pittcon is a more industry/instrumentation/technical-focused conference compared to others and would be a good conference to attend if you are interested in a technical position in industry. They have an employment bureau as a part of the registration to help you find potential employers. Student (undergraduate and graduate) registration is $50.