Newsletter - Vol.1 No.1, Sept. 2010

Vol.1 No.1, Sept. 2010

Editor:  Jenny Takacs jtakacs@umd.edu

Contents:  Announcements, Honors and Awards, Contracts, Grants, Papers Published, Invited Presentations, Patents, What's New, Alumni News

New Faculty 

Assistant Professor Paul Paukstelis joined our faculty in January, leaving his position of Research Associate, Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, at the University of Texas at Austin. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology at the university with Professor Alan Lambowitz. His laboratory is broadly interested in nucleic acid structure.


Associate Professor Garyk Papoian has moved from a tenured position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to join our faculty in the areas of theoretical and computational chemistry. Papoian's group has been developing detailed computational models of the way eukaryotic cells move around and sense their environment. He has a joint appointment at Maryland and the Institute for Physical Science and Technology.


Assistant Professor Zhihong Nie will arrive in January.  He is currently an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor George Whitesides at Harvard University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto with Professor Eugenia Kumacheva.  Nie's research interests include the synthesis, fabrication, and self-assembly of functional nanostructures for the development of renewable energy.


Professors Oznat Herzberg and John Orban and Assistant Professors James L. Edwards and Shuwei Li have joined the department, with a 50% appointment in Chemistry and Biochemistry and a 50% appointment with the new Institute for Biotechnology and Biomedical Research. Edwards' specialties are metabolomics of diabetic complications, bioanalytical chemistry, biochemistry, and mass spectrometry.  Herzberg specializes in structural biology with focus on protein crystallography.  Li is invested in genomics and proteomics, and Orban's research is with NMR spectroscopy in structural and functional genomics, protein folding and stability, and multidomain proteins.

Lecturers Elizabeth McGaw and James Watson have joined the Instructional Faculty.

New Staff

 
Welcome to Lakea Shirriel the new Account Clerk in the Business office. Shirl Phelps has joined the department as the JPC Editorial Assistant.

Awards/Honors:  Faculty

John Weeks, Distinguished University Professor, was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences during its annual meeting in April.

Devarajan Thirumalai , Director of the Biophysics Program, received the honor of Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland.  He is the fourth member of our department to receive this honor.

In May Dr. Doyle was awarded an Ethnic Minority Achievement Award by the PCEMI (President's Commission on Ethnic Minority Initiatives) for his efforts to support the university's goal of "creating an institution of excellence through diversity." 

Congratulations to Barbara Gerratana and Bonnie Dixon, who were selected as Philip Merrill Presidential Scholar faculty mentors.

Professor William Walters received the 2010 College of Chemical and Life Sciences Research Award.

Frederick Khachik received the 2010 Astellas Foundation Award at the National ACS meeting in August.

Professor Emeritus Jack Tossell has been selected to receive the 2011 Geochemistry Division Medal from the Division of Chemistry of the ACS.

Professor Neil V. Blough was awarded an Excellence in Review award by the ACS journal, "Environmental Science & Technology".

Svetla Baykoucheva has been awarded the Val Metanomski Meritorious Award by the Division of Chemical Information of the ACS. 

Awards/Honors:  Students

Will Harrell has been awarded an NRC post-doctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, MD. Will, a graduate student in the Davis group, will begin his position later this fall.

Alexandra Brozena, a graduate student with Dr. Wang's group, was awarded the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Fellowship.

Romina Heyman with Dr. Falvey's group received the Albertus Magnus Award for Outstanding Teaching in General Chemistry.

Abulfazl Fakhari with Dr. Rokita's group received the Carl L. Rollinson Teaching Award for excellence in teaching advanced chemistry courses.

Stefanie Sherrill participated in the 60th Meeting of Nobel Laureates from June 27th - July 2nd.  Sixty Nobel Laureates and approximately 650 graduate students from around the world met in Lindau, Germany for lectures by the Laureates, discussions and the opportunity to meet one on one with the Laureates and graduate students.

 Announcements

 
CHEM 608 "Chemical and Biochemical Metrology" is presented by Marc Salit and Dave Duewer (NSIT) on Wednesdays 5-8 pm.

Professor Amy Mullin was appointed to the Resource Letters Editorial Board of the American Associate of Physics Teachers and the American Journal of Physics.

Professor Emeritus Gerald R. Miller has been elected to the University Senate as a representative of the emeritus faculty.

Associate Professor Andrei Vedernikov organized the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Seaboard Inorganic (MASI) Symposium at the University of Maryland.  This meeting, which was held on August 4th, attracted more than 80 participants.

Ph.D. graduate Christopher LaFratta of Professor John Fourkas' group has taken a position as Assistant Professor in the Chemistry Department at Bard College.

Dr. Jinxi Li received her Ph.D. degree for thesis work on a project directed jointly by Professor Catherine Fenselau and Dr. John Callahan (Center for Food Safety FDA). She has taken a post-doctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Maurice Burg, NHLBI at the NIH.

 Grants

 
Yuhuang Wang has been awarded a $100,000 grant for his project: Interfacial Chemistry of Carbon-based Photovoltaics, by the American Chemical Society.

Neil V. Blough has been award a $605,451 grant for his project: Investigating the Structural Basis of the Optical and Photochemical Properties of CDOM, by the National Science Foundation.

David Fushman announced in May that the consortium of UMCP, UMB, and UMBC have been awarded nearly $8M for the purchase of a 950 MHz NMR spectrometer.  David Fushman with his colleagues Kwaku Dayie and Vitali Tugarinov put together the UMCP component that will provide about 25% use time on this instrument.  This was the only 950 MHz NMR awarded and is the only one in public institutions in the US.

The University of Maryland has received a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation to acquire a superconducting 800 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer. Associate Professor Kwaku Dayie is the principal investigator on the grant. The instrument will be the highest field NMR spectrometer to be located on the College Park campus.

Invited Presentations

 
Catherine Fenselau spoke in the Field and Franklin Award Symposium at the August meeting of the American Chemical Society. Her title was "Middle-down peptide analysis using an LTQ orbitrap".  Professor Fenselau received the Field and Franklin award in 2008.

Millard Alexander Professor John Fourkas gave a plenary lecture at the International Conference on Nanophotonics, which was held in Tsukuba, Japan.

Professor Dorothy Beckett co-chaired, with Michael Hecht of Princeton University, the Biopolymers Gordon Research Conference that was held in June in Newport, Rhode Island.

Dorothy Beckett was an invited speaker in the Biothermodynamics Symposium at the International Conference on Chemical Thermodynamics (ICCT-2010) that was held in Tsukuba, Japan.

Professor William Walters spoke at the 10th International Spring Seminar on Nuclear Physics, New Quests in Nuclear Structure, in Vietri Sul Mare, Italy, in May 2010. The title was "Particle-hole intruder levels in 67Cu: collectivity, monopole shifts, and the hockey-stick behavior of l -1/2  5/2- levels in neutron-rich odd-mass Cu nuclei."

Presented by Associate Professor Sang Bok Lee: "Nanotubes and Heterogeneous Nanowires: Fast Electrochemistry, from Fast Electrochromics to Supercapacitors", LG-Chem Research Park, President Invitation, May 10, 2010, Daejun, Korea; and
"Nanotubes and Nanowires at Bio/Nano/Energy Interfaces", WCU International Conference, National Research Foundation of Korea, May 18, 2010, Korea.

Dr. Doyle spoke in April as the Abbott Lecturer at the University of North Dakota.  The titles were "Challenges to Education in the Sciences in a Time of Change" and "The Magic of Dirhodium".

At the University of Illinois at Chicago in May Dr. Doyle presented "Dual Kinase Inhibitors of the Insulin-like Growth Factor and Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor Families" and "The Magic of Dirhodium".

 Papers Published 

"Good Practices in Free-Energy Calculations", Andrew Pohorille (NASA Ames Research Center), Christopher Jarzynski, Christopher Chipot (University of Illinois), was the feature article for the August 19, 2010 issues of the J. Phys. Chem. B.

"Redox Exchange Induced MnO2-Nanoparticle Enrichment in Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) Nanowires for Electrochemical Energy Storage", Ran Liu, Jonathon Duay, Sang Bok Lee, ACS Nano, 2010, 4, 4299-4307.

"Metal-Enhanced Multiphoton Absorption Polymerization with Gold Nanowires", Sanghee Nah, Linjie Li, Ran Liu, Junjie Hao, Sang Bok Lee, John Fourkas, J. Phys. Chem. 2010, 114, 7774-7779.

"Profile Evolution for Conformal Atomic Layer Deposition over Nanotopography", Erin R. Cleveland, Parag Banerjee, Israel Perez, Sang Bok Lee, Gary W. Rubloff, ACS Nano, 2010, 4, 4637-4644.

"Shape-coded silica nanotubes for multiplexed bioassay: rapid and reliable magnetic decoding protocols", Bo He, Sung Kyoung Kim, Sang Jun Son, Sang Bok Lee, Nanomedicine, 2010, 5, 77-88.

"Synthesis and Characterization of RuO2/poly (3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) Composite Nanotubes for Supercapacitors", Ran Liu, Jonathon Duay, Timothy Lane, Sang Bok Lee, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2010, 12, 4309 - 4316.

"Heterogeneous films of ordered CeO2/Ni concentric nanostructures for fuel cell applications", Chunjuan Zhang, Jessica Grandner, Ran Liu, Sang Bok Lee, Bryan W. Eichhorn, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2010, 12, 4295 - 4300.

"Growth of wildtype and mutant E. coli strains in minimal media for optimal production of nucleic acids for preparing labeled nucleotides", Thakur CS, Brown ME, Sama JN, Jackson ME, Dayie TK, Appl. Microbiol. Biotechnol., 2010 Aug 21, Epub ahead of print.

"Site-specific labeling of nucleotides for making RNA for high resolution NMR studies using an E. coli strain disabled in the oxidative pentose phosphate pathway", Dayie TK, Thakur CS, J Biomol. NMR, 2010 May; 47(1):19-31. Epub 2010, Mar 23.

"Phyloproteomic classification of unsequenced organisms by top-down identification of bacterial proteins using capLC-MS/MS on an Orbitrap", Colin Wynne, Nathan J. Edwards, Catherine Fenselau, Proteomics 2010, 10: Article first published online: 2 AUG 2010, DOI : 10.1002/pmic.201000172

What's New

 
On July 29 the First Annual Departmental Retreat was held for staff at Buddy Attick Park in Old Greenbelt. The goal of the event was to foster teamwork and to assist managers in determining staffers' learning styles. The team-building exercises were followed by a hot dog and hamburger barbeque where all preparations, cooking and serving were handled by senior managers. A summer storm forced everyone to run for cover and the day's events were concluded at the Woods Atrium in the Chemistry Building. As one staffer stated, "Rain could not dampen our mission to have fun and enjoy each other's company."

Alumni News

 
Dr. J. David Robertson (Ph. D. 1986, Walters), Professor of Chemistry at the University of Missouri, was selected in 2010 as a "Fellow of the American Chemical Society".

Matt Disney, (B.S. 1997 and an HHMI Fellow from the Davis Lab) recently left his tenured position at SUNY-Buffalo to assume a faculty position in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. Matt, a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, is a leader in the bio-organic chemistry of RNA.