Chemistry News
by Judith Klinman, Chair

Changing of the Guard

With only three months remaining of my tenure as Chair of Chemistry (but who’s counting!), this will be my last column for the NewsJournal in this capacity.

I am delighted to tell you that last fall the department voted to promote Professor Jeffrey Long to tenure. Jeff is an inorganic chemist with interests in the design of molecules with unique electronic and magnetic properties.

The department has also been active in recruiting new faculty. A number of outstanding candidates were interviewed for an Assistant Professor position and, in the end, we are pleased to announce that Dr. Chris Chang, currently a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, will be joining the faculty in July 2004, after completing his postdoctoral research. Chris is interested in synthesis from a physical inorganic perspective. His thesis work involved the design of models for the conversion of water to O2 (as occurs in photosynthesis) and the reduction of O2 to water (as occurs during respiration). For the future he plans to move in the direction of neurochemistry, for example, in the development of methods for the detection of metal ion gradients at synapses. The department also made an offer to Dr. Melanie Sanford, a talented organic and inorganic chemist currently doing a postdoc at Princeton University. However, she decided to begin her career as an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and we wish her much success.

Space continues to be at a premium and will be so until completion of the Stanley Hall replacement building. Demolition of the old Stanley Hall is in progress - with the "big demolition" taking place on April 3rd, as camera buffs clicked away. Given that budget reductions are in full swing, it is fortunate that we have successfully completed so much of our recruitment in the last three to four years. The hope and expectation is that the budget outlook will improve at about the same time that the new Stanley Hall construction is completed.

As of this coming July, Professors Herbert Strauss and Paul Bartlett will be retiring. They have both had long and distinguished careers in their research activities. Professor Strauss has served as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs for eight years, providing guidance to innumerable undergraduate students during this time. Professor Bartlett served as Chair of the Department, as my immediate predecessor, and was instrumental in beginning the initiative to hire faculty at the interface of chemistry and biology. As part of our newly instituted Monday faculty lunch research series, Professor Bartlett delighted us with his summary of “Thirty years (of research) in thirty minutes.” Please join me in wishing them much pleasure and success in this next phase of their lives.

We are now completing the second year of our graduate chemical biology program. This year a total of eleven students were given the opportunity to perform three ten-week rotations in laboratories in both the Chemistry and Molecular and Cell Biology departments. The organization of a poster session at the end of each ten-week rotation provides a wonderful social and scientific forum for the faculty and these students. In an exciting development, the department has also just voted to introduce a new major at the undergraduate level, a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Biology. Professor Ken Sauer, working with members of the Chemistry Department, has assembled a curriculum that maintains the rigor of our traditional B.S. in Chemistry, while making it possible to incorporate modern aspects of biology that include the structure and molecular mechanisms of macromolecules. In implementing this major, we will be introducing new upper-division lecture and laboratory courses.

As always, our faculty continues to garner many honors.

• Recently, Dean Toste received a Research Innovation Award (Research Corp.) and Boehringer-Ingelhiem New Faculty Award
• Robert Bergman received the Sigma Xi Monie Ferst Award
• Peidong Yang was awarded a Beckman Young Investigator Award
• Clayton Heathcock received the H. C. Brown Award from the ACS
• Jeff Long won the Wilson Prize
• Gabor Somorjai was named University Professor
• Don Tilley received the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry
• Birgitta Whaley was awarded a Miller Professorship
• Jean Fréchet was appointed to the Henry Rapoport Chair in Organic Chemistry
• Michael Marletta was named the Aldo DeBenedictus Distinguished Professor
• Robert Bergman is the new Gerald E. K. Branch Distinguished Professor
• Peidong Yang is the new holder of the ChevronTexaco Chair
• I was appointed to the Joel H. Hildebrand Distinguished Professorship
  

In closing, I’d like to mention a few of my thoughts on being Chair. The downsides for me have been having too little time to interact with students and postdocs and being "on call" virtually all the time. I am also disappointed by our failure to further diversify the department during my tenure. The upsides have included the opportunity to represent the department in the larger context of the University, a first-hand appreciation of the enormous effort expended by the departmental staff, and the opportunity to help shape the growing biology-chemistry interface within the department and College of Chemistry.

Related sites

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