The ACS Bridge to the Doctorate Program is a national effort to increase the number of chemical science PhDs awarded to underrepresented students defined by the project as primarily Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students. The ACS Bridge Program was also recently highlighted in C&E News, and it features UW-Madison fellow Jairo Villalona!

More information about ACS Bridge Program is available online, including eligibility and application materials.

Application materials must be received by March 31.  Please note that students who are interested in participating specifically in our UW-Madison/ACS Bridge program must apply to the national application portal as indicated above and be selected through UW-Madison’s selection process in order to be designated as UW-Madison/ACS Bridge Fellows. Please contact UW-Madison ACS Bridge Program leaders Desiree Bates or Bob Hamers with any questions.

Posted on behalf of the ACS and the UW-Madison.

Our honorees this year are each highlighted in this special issue of our newsletter. They include:

• 70-year, 60-year, and 50-year ACS members
• ACS-Hach Land Grant Scholarship recipients
• ACS-Hach High School Chemistry Classroom Grant recipient
• ACS Bridge Program Students
• ACS Undergraduate Awardees
• Prize Winners in the local exam, U.S. National Chemistry Olympiad Competition

Of course, all honorees will receive their official ACS Certificate of Recognition in the mail and will be honored in person when we are able to hold a banquet!

The ACS Organic Division has been hard at work this summer and is now ready to release a new resource for organic chemists: https://organicchemistrydata.org/

The idea and majority of the current content (~1500 html pages + 650 PDF files) of the Organic Chemistry Data website has come from the late Professor Hans J. Reich who served his entire professional academic career at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Upon his untimely death in 2020, the ACS Organic Division offered to assist in maintaining Professor Reich’s extensive online resources which have impacted the organic chemistry community worldwide. This new website not only contains Prof. Reich’s collection of resources, we have also merged our extensive “links page” with Professor Reich’s to create a single list of ~300 website resources on organic chemistry (~35 are to resources in our Reich Collection). The linked pages have been selected for ease of use, broad applicability, and quality of coverage. Topics include: Reaction Info, Chemical Data, Spectroscopy Resources, Organic Compound Info, Safety, Chemical Societies & Portals, Literature Sources, Laboratory Techniques, Useful Software, Resources for Educators and Students, and Organic Chemistry Videos.

We hope that the data and information resources provided and the links to resources off of this new website provide organic chemists quick access to high quality information to facilitate their efforts in the laboratory and classroom settings. Links to resources off of this website are meant to assist individuals in finding high quality information; they are not an endorsement of any product, service, or website.

Highlights on the Reich Collection of Resources:

•     ~700 Total Syntheses searchable and categorized by compound name, named reactions used, chemoselectivity, rings formed, reaction types, and reagents used, and year of publication. In most of these modes, selecting the synthesis in a particular category presents the synthesis with a blinking red arrow to highlight where the reagent, named reaction, reaction type, or ring appear in the synthetic scheme.
•     A comprehensive Topics in NMR database (e.g. spin systems, chemical shifts, coupling constants, multinuclear NMR)
•     An NMR Spectral Database with ~650 high quality NMR spectra (PDF files) which are searchable and grouped by functional group, molecular formula, NMR spin systems, techniques (i.e. cyclohexane stereochemistry & 2D), multinuclear (D, T, P, F, B, Se, Si, Sn, N), and spectral level (i.e. trivial–advanced).
•     Information on some of the fundamentals of organic chemistry. e.g. pKa tables, electron pushing, A-values, nomenclature, organometallic chemistry (esp. organolithium reagents), pericyclic reactions, reduction and oxidation.

Professor Hans J. Reich was born May 6, 1943 in Danzig, Germany. After earning a B.Sc. at the University of Alberta in 1964, he entered graduate school at UCLA, receiving a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1968 (with D. J. Cram). In graduate school, he met fellow organic chemistry student, Ieva Lazdins and they married in 1969. The two were lifelong companions, socially and scientifically. After graduate school, he spent two years as a postdoctoral associate supported by a Canadian National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the first at CalTech (with J. D. Roberts) and the second at Harvard (with R. B. Woodward). In 1970, he joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, establishing what soon became an internationally recognized research program in physical-organic chemistry publishing 157 papers throughout his career. Fittingly, Professor Reich received the James Flack Norris Award in Physical-Organic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society in 2012. Additionally, he was a pioneer in distribution of educational content via the world wide web. He began teaching himself programming in the late 1990s, producing new freeware programs, WinPLT and WinDNMR. These programs managed chemical structure drawings, NMR spectra annotations, and simulations cohesively. As an outgrowth of these endeavors, he began the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Organic Chemistry Information webpage in which he accumulated and curated information for the broader chemistry community to use free of charge.

The vast majority of work on setting up this website  and converting the content of Prof. Reich’s websites so that the content is viewable/useable on a wide range of electronic devices where through the immense volunteer efforts of Organic Division Assistant Webmaster Dr. Khoi Van (Ph.D., Organic Chemistry with Professor Daniel Romo) with initial oversight, support, and direction from Organic Division Webmaster Brian Myers (Ph.D., Organic Chemistry with Professor David R. Williams) and Organic Division Head Webmaster Joseph Ward (Ph.D., Organic Chemistry with Professor Robert Maleczka).

We are grateful to the University of Wisconsin-Madison (especially the Chemistry department) for their support in this project. We also graciously thank his wife, Dr. Ieva L. Reich, and her family for supporting this project where we are able to honor Professor Reich’s 25+ years of website efforts in support of the broader organic chemistry community.

While this website (https://organicchemistrydata.org/) is freely available to everyone in the organic chemistry community, it is underwritten and maintained by the ACS Organic Division which gets its funding for projects like this from membership fees: ACS Members ($15), Affiliate Members ($15 without ACS membership), or Student Members ($5). Please consider showing your support for this program as well as all the other Division’s programs that aim to foster and promote the advancement of the field of organic chemistry by joining the division: https://www.organicdivision.org/join/

Wisconsin Local Section member and Associate Director of the Institute of Chemical Education at UW-Madison Andrew Greenberg has created two educational videos in honor of Earth Week! Both can be viewed using the links below:

Earth Friendly Plastics:  https://go.wisc.edu/uh291e

(Re)Cycling Water:  https://go.wisc.edu/8v3o35

More videos and educational materials for all ages are available at the ACS Chemists Celebrate Earth Week website.

Are You a HS Chemistry Teacher? Do You Know Your Local HS Chemistry Teacher?

This is an opportunity to get a grant of up to $750 to attend a chemistry education conference in summer 2020.

The 26^th Biennial Conference on Chemical Education (BCCE) will be held at Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon from July 18 to 23, 2020. The Wisconsin Section will sponsor two high school teachers to attend the conference. Details about how to apply are on our Grants page.

The Wisconsin Section sponsored three teachers to attend the 25^th BCCE in summer 2018 and all three found the experience extremely valuable. If you are interested in attending, we urge you to apply; if you know of fellow teachers who might want to attend, please tell them about this opportunity.

The deadline for applications is February 8, 2020. We would love to support teacher attendance at this conference!

NOTE: Even if you can’t attend the BCCE, we invite you to participate in the Wisconsin Section of the ACS. If you are not already a member/affiliate member, you can become an affiliate member of our local section for just $2 per year and receive information about our professional development and social events as well as getting a regular newsletter. Send an email to jwmoore@chem.wisc.edu if you would like to join.

Science on Tap turned out to be a very popular event! It took place on Monday, August 19, in Union South on the UW-Madison campus under the joint sponsorship of Mirus Bio and the ACS Wisconsin Local Section. About 100 people turned out for the early evening event. It began with complimentary beverages (including local beers) and food, giving grad students, post-docs, faculty and staff as well as members of the biotech community a chance to mix and meet each other.

Then it was time for the focus of this series—highlighting how research from various scientific disciplines such as Chemistry, Engineering, Biology, and Genetics can combine to deliver groundbreaking scientific research in our community. This took form in a talk by Dr. Christian Capitini on “The Emergence of CAR-T Cell Therapy”. He shared the latest developments as well as his own research efforts with CAR-T Cells. Capitini is in the Department of Pediatrics, UW School of Medicine and Public Health and Carbone Cancer Center.

See more photos from the event on our Flickr page!

Science on Tap August 2019 event