Chemistry News Archives
[current news]- Professor Michael Therien is one of only eight new faculty members (out of 275) featured in this year's new faculty profile at Duke.
- Faculty Scholar Award One of our undergraduate majors, Yun (Rose) Li, has won a Faculty Scholar Award. There are usually only three such awards per academic year! The Faculty Scholar Award is the highest honor awarded by Duke faculty to our undergraduates. The award was established in 1974 by the faculty and is administered by the Academic Council through its Faculty Scholar Committee. Candidates demonstrate achievement in independent scholarship and offer outstanding academic records. For more information on the Faculty Scholar Program and a list of past recipients please go to the Academic council website: http://academiccouncil.duke.edu/faculty-scholars/.
- Chemistry of Fire On Sept. 29, at 7pm the Department of Chemistry held its 5th Annual Evening of Chemistry Demonstration program (Photos). This year's program focused on the chemistry of fire, flammability properties of various substances, and how fire is effected by various chemical compositions.
- Dr. Ivan Piletic was a poster prize winner at the Fitzpatrick Institute for Photonics' annual meeting October 6 for his presentation "Imaging Melanomas with Nonlinear Infrared Transient Absorption Microscopy". This was the only prize awarded outside of the Engineering School. The work reflects a joint effort between Duke's Chemistry, Dermatology, and Pathology Departments.
- Another article celebrating James Bonk's fifty years on the faculty here in Chemistry has been published, this time in the October 7 Raleigh News and Observer. There will be more formal activities here at Duke later this year.
- Warren's group has been awarded an NIH Challenge Grant for their work on detecting melanoma with nonlinear laser microscopy. This work includes a collaboration with multiple groups at the Medical Center to demonstrate clinical relevance. The two-year, $1M Challenge Grant program attracted more than 20,000 applications nationwide, and had one of the lowest success rates in the history of NIH.
- Congratulations to Amanda Kasper, a graduate student in the Hong laboratory, who has been selected to attend the Fourth Annual NIH National Graduate Student Research Festival and present her research.
- Dr. Paula Mori-Sanchez, a research associate in the Yang laboratory, has
recently received the Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, a prestigious faculty
fellowship in Spain. She will join Universidad
Autonoma de Madrid.
- Dr. Andres Cisneros, a former graduate student of Duke Chemistry Department
under the supervision of Professor Yang, has recently taken an Assistant Professorship of Chemistry at Wayne State University.
- RESEARCH ASSOCIATE: Will conduct work on the Inverse Design Project
with an emphasis on nonlinear optics, mentoring graduate students and assisting with grant writing. Requires Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry. Knowledge of electronic structure theory molecular chirality metrics required. 40 hrs. 08.30am to 5.00pm. Work location: Department of Chemistry at Duke University in Durham NC 27708. Apply: Cecilia Eichenberger, Dept. of Chemistry, Duke University, Box 90347, Durham NC 27708. Email: TheoryOffice@chem.duke.edu.
- Drug Abuse Research Highlighted Recent work led by Prof. Jiyong Hong has been selected as a Highlight in Chemical Biology by the RSC. Prof. Hong, Prof. Beratan, and their collaborators have identified three benzopyranone derivatives that might serve as the scaffolds for future therapeutics for treating drug dependency.
- Congratulations to Mariam Sharaf Mariam L. Sharaf of the Shaw lab was awarded BEST POSTER award at the 2009 Gordon Research Conference on Nucleosides, Nucleotides, and Oligonucleotides for her work on boranophosphate- modified RNA to silence gene expression.
- Congratulations to Professors Al Crumbliss and Michael Fitzgerald Professors Al Crumbliss and Michael Fitzgerald are the senior authors on a "hot article" featured on the cover of the first issue of Metallomics. Their article, "Hijacking transferrin bound iron: protein-receptor interactions involved in iron transport in N. gonorrhoeae" describes how pathogenic bacteria steal iron from their human hosts.
- Congratulations to Prof. Katherine Franz, who has been awarded a Camille-Dreyfuss Teacher Scholar
Award in
recognition of her outstanding accomplishments in research and
education.
- The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that Dr. Benjamin Wiley joined the department July 1, 2009 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Wiley has authored 39 papers in a wide range of journals. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering in 2003 from the University of Minnesota and received his graduate degree from the University of Washington under the direction of Professor Younan Xia.
- The Department congratulates Prof. Jiyong Hong, who has received an Early Career Award in Chemistry of Drug Abuse and Addiction from the NIH.
- Congratulations to the Class of 2009! On May 10, the Chemistry Department held a diploma ceremony for its bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degree graduates of the Class of 2009. The accomplishments of these students are noted in the program for this event. We wish them well as they move on in their lives.
The Chair's presentation at graduation is included here as well. - Professor Warren's group has just published its second Science paper in five months. In this paper, they develop a new class of "hyperpolarized" magnetic resonance contrast agents that could dramatically extend the utility of magnetic resonance spectroscopy in vivo to detect the changes in metabolism caused (for example) by cancer. In this paper, the group extended the concept of singlet states from the quantum mechanics of very small molecules (such as the hydrogen molecule), and shows that near-singlets can be found in much larger molecules. These very long lived states can be used as MR targets. This work is done in conjuction with the Small Molecule Synthesis Facility.
- Congratulations to Elizabeth Jenista of the Warren Group! From June 28th to July 3rd, 2009 about 20 Nobel Laureates will meet at Lindau, Germany with young researchers from around the world for the 59th Meeting of Nobel Laureates. The 2009 Lindau Meeting will be dedicated to chemistry and Liz has been selected to attend this meeting.
Liz is a fourth-year graduate student who is a coauthor on two Science papers in the last five months (and the senior student author on the most recent one, which comes out this Friday). She has also recently been invited to speak at several other meetings, and is one of our Departmental fellowship winners for 2008-2009. - Congratulations to Yongho Park and Mays Ali! The North Carolina Section of the American Chemical Society awarded two NC ACS Undergraduate Scholarships to Duke chemistry undergraduate students, Yongho Park and Mays Ali. Yongho is a rising senior of the Hong group researching the synthesis of biologically interesting natural products. He will be receiving the Howie James Scholarship. Mays, a rising junior, is also conducting her research in the Hong group to identify and characterize small molecule modulators of
histone deacetylases for treatment of a variety of human diseases.
- DNA-based Nanotechnology Symposium A full-day symposium on DNA-based Nanotechnology will be held at Duke University on Friday, March 20, 2009.
The symposium will feature the director and several members from the Centre for DNA Nanotechnology at Aarhus University, a center of excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation. Confirmed speakers include Ned Seeman, father of the field of structural DNA nanotech; Peter Nielsen, inventor of PNA; Jesper Wengel, inventor of LNA; Flemming Besenbacher, director of the iNANO Center; and other research leaders from the US (Hao Yan, ASU; William Shih, Harvard; Chengde Mao, Purdue) and Denmark (Kurt Gothelf & Jorgen Kjems).
The symposium will be held from 8:30 am to 4:45 pm in Auditorium 103 of the Bryan Research Building
- The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce that fourth year Ph.D. student, Claire Siburt, of the Crumbliss lab has been chosen as one of only three graduate students to receive the 2009 Dean's Award for Excellence in Teaching by Duke University Graduate School. She will be honored during the Annual Teaching Awards Banquet on April 21, 2009.
This award recognizes the considerable efforts and accomplishments of faculty and graduate students who consistently serve as effective mentors. Designed to allow the university community to identify faculty and graduate students who embody both the letter and spirit of mentoring, these awards are important examples of the university's continuing efforts to cultivate a culture of mentoring. - Duke Chemistry is pleased to host the 2009 Southeastern Theoretical
Chemistry Association Meeting May 15-16, 2009 in the French Family Science
Center.
- Jiyong Hong's research group has reported in J. Am. Chem. Soc. that the immunosuppressive compound Subglutinol A has dose- dependent osteogenic activity across a full range of potentially
clinically relevant concentrations. Their finding, enabled by the
group's stereoselective synthesis of Subglutinol A reported in the
same article, is in stark contrast to that of most immunosuppressive
drugs (cyclosporin A, FK506), which tend to lead to undesirable side
effects on bone structure. With their collaborators, the Hong group
goes on to show that activating protein 1 (AP-1) family transcription
factors could be one of the key regulators for the anabolic activity
of subglutinol A.
- A team led by Professor Jie Liu discovered a method to prepare well aligned semiconducting carbon nanotubes by adjusting growth conditions. These nanotubes are suitable for large scale fabrication of electronic devices. A report on their achievement, co-authored by Liu and a team of collaborators from his Duke laboratory and Peking University in China, was published Jan 20, 2009 in the research journal Nano Letters.
- News & Observer article concerning the above discovery.
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