12/19/2002

Two of Stan Wong's graduate students were recently honored at National Professional meetings

• Sarbajit Banerjee - - Gold Medal Award winner "in recognition of outstanding performance in the conduct of research" (Graduate Student Awards) for talk entitled, “Carbon Nanotube Sidewalls and End Caps as Target Sites for Chemical Modification: Chemical Control Over Nanotube Properties”, Materials Research Society – December 2-6, 2002 (Boston, MA).
• Michael G.C. Kahn - - First Place finish in Chemistry category for “Solubilization of Oxidized Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes in Organic and Aqueous Solvents through Organic Derivatization” at the 2002 Sigma Xi Student Research Conference. Galveston, TX, November 16, 2002.
  

11/25/2002

• The University has received an award of $750,000 over two years under the New York State Science, Technology and Academic Research Office Faculty Development Program to facilitate the creation of an Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery under the leadership of Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Iwao Ojima. The program's mandate is to assist institutions of higher education in New York State in the recruitment and retention of leading faculty in science and technology fields with strong commercial potential.
• Prof Ojima is also featured on RF Central's "Research Spotlight", located on RF's website.

11/21/2002

• Professor Benjamin S. Hsiao has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was nominated for this honor by the Society's Division of Polymer Physics "for insightful experiments to elucidate the early stages of crystallization of polymers, particularly through development of powerful synchrotron X-ray techniques".
  

10/29/2002

• High school student researchers, Kerry Lannigan, from Kings Park High School, who worked in Iwao Ojima's laboratory and Limor Spector, a high school student from the Three Village School District, who worked in Ben Chu's laboratory, were named Semifinalists in the Siemens Westinghouse national science competition.
  

10/10/2002

• CHEMISTRY RESEARCH DAY - 2003 is scheduled for Feb 14, 2003. Watch for details

08/25/2002

• Chemistry @ The Brook is coming soon

08/09/2002

• Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Lab will sponsor a Workshop on Electron-Phonon Effects in Nanostructures on Sept 23 - 25
• The Department of Chemistry congratulates Professors Fowler, Lauher and Chu for having been awarded Special Creativity Extension Awards by NSF. the National Science Foundation makes such awards to offer the most creative investigators an extended opportunity to attack adventurous, 'high risk' opportunities in the same general research area, but not necessarily covered by their original/current proposals.

08/08/2002

• Updated Graph of Chemistry Department RF Research Expenditures

07/16/2002

• Posted a picture of the Summer 2002 REU participants

05/28/2002

• Posted Dr. John Piwinski's inspiring address to graduates at the 2002 Departmental Commencement. It should make all of us proud to be chemists.
  

05/24/2002

• Two students working in the Chemistry Department received research awards at the May 1 Celebration of Undergraduate Achievements. The Sigma Xi Award in the Physical Sciences went to Sheila Shokrian, a junior Pharmacology major working with Prof. Stan Wong. Her project was entitled "The Encapsulation of Silver Sulfadiazine with a Silica Shell." Brookhaven Science Associates Awards in the Physical Sciences went to Sheila and to Patrick Schreiber, whose work, with Prof. Scott Sieburth (now at Temple University), was entitled "Pyridone [4 + 4] Photochemistry." Patrick, a BCH major, graduated on May 17 and will attend Stony Brook School of Medicine in the Fall.

• The Department held its 32nd Departmental Commencement on May 17, 2002. The commencement address was delivered by Dr. John Piwinski (B.S., 1976), Vice President, Chemical Research at Schering-Plough.
• Ten undergraduates will participate in the Department's REU program this summer. They come from such diverse places as the State of Washington, Ohio, Minnesota, California, New Jersey, Georgia, New Jersey and New York. They will begin their summer program during the first week in June.

• Excellence in Research - Xudong Geng (Iwao Ojima), Jianfeng Jiang (Stephen Koch), Pankaj Rege (Francis Johnson), Satoshi Sato (Daniel Raleigh), Sharada Sivaraman (Peter Tonge), Matthew Sturm (undergraduate with Iwao Ojima), Ye Yin (Nicole Sampson)
• Travel Awards - Santanu Chaudhuri (Clare Grey), Richa Rawat (Peter Tonge), Jeffrey Webb (Nancy Goroff), Xinyuan Wu (Iwao Ojima), Samidha Konkar (Nicole Sampson), Kenny Roberts (Nicole Sampson)

• Xudong Geng (Iwao Ojima) - Maria Tzamarioudaki Memorial Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
• Yuguo Feng (Peter Tonge) - Lee Myers Award for Outstanding Doctoral Chemistry Student
• Xiang He (Peter Tonge) - Chemistry Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
• Yin Ye (Nicole Sampson) - Chemistry Award for Outstanding Doctoral Student
• Jiaquan Wu (Peter Tonge) - Chemistry Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research
• Sharada Sivaraman (Peter Tonge) - Chemistry Award for Excellence in Doctoral Research
• Brian Foster (Peter Tonge) - Chemistry First-Year Teaching Assistant Award
  

• Jianfeng Jiang (Stephen Koch)
• Satoshi Sato (Daniel Raleigh)

• In recognition of his outstanding contributions as an educator and scholar, Bob Kerber has been appointed Distinguished Teaching Professor

• SUNY Chancellor King will honor Iwao Ojima and other Stony Brook faculty at a ceremony celebrating SUNY's inventors and enterpreneurs. Prof. Ojima joins four other USB faculty in the category Premier Inventor.

• We note with sadness the passing of Prof. Ted Goldfarb. Ted joined the Chemistry Department in 1959 and lost a courageous battle with leukemia. (Provst Robert McGrath's announcement)

• The Chemistry department has been selected to receive a Presidential Mini-Grant Award for Innovative Teaching Projects in the amount of $2,500.00. Marge Kandel put great effort into the preparation of this proposal and her efforts are greatly appreciated. These funds will augment funds on hand for the undergraduate program, specifically, Senior Laboratory Projects in Chemistry (CHE 482).

• Two Chemistry graduate students have been chosen to receive the 2002 President's Award to Distinguished Doctoral Students:
  • Jianfeng Jiang, who works with Steve Koch, and
  • Satoshi Sato, who works with Dan Raleigh
    

• Bob Schneider has been selected to receive a President's and Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, joining seven of his colleagues who have received that distinction.

02/28/2002

• Alexei Khokhlov (Professor, Moscow State University and Adjunct Professor at Stony Brook) was awarded the Wolfgang Paul Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin last November.

• Kwadwo Bonsu, a biochemistry major undergraduate student at SUNYSB, has just become the ACS Scholar 2001-2002. The news has been published in the Feb 18, 2002 issue of C&E News. Mr. Bonsu has been working in the Chu/Hsiao group on a biodegradable polymer project for biomedical applications.

This year's Service Awards Ceremony honored four Chemistry Department members:

• Prof. Arnold Wishnia, Prof. Emeritus, Albert Haim and Donna Barrington-Stotsky, who were recognized for 35 years of service to the University and the department
• Jane Wainio, who was recognized for 20 years of service

• James Lightstone, a graduate student working with Professor Michael White, has been chosen by the Department of Energy as one of twenty two graduate students nationwide to participate in the 52nd Meeting of Nobel laureates to held in Lindau, Germany this coming July. This meeting provides an opportunity for outstanding students to interact with former Nobel Prize winners and other students from around the world in an informal setting. This year's meeting highlights research in chemistry and will involve the participation of more than twenty Nobel laureates and approximately 400 students world-wide. Jim is a recent graduate of Southampton College (LIU) where he received his B.S. degree in Chemistry in 1999 and where he developed and interest in physical chemistry through his interactions with Southampton's Prof. Susan Oatis (Ph.D, USB - Philip Johnson, 1990), a longtime BNL collaborator. From the summer of his sophomore year, until the start of graduate studies at Stony brook in the Fall of 2000,

• Congratulations to Yeon-Hee Lim, of the Sieburth group, whose poster was awarded ‘Best of Show’ at the Second Annual Graduate Student Poster Session, held January 24th at Drexel University and sponsored by the Philadelphia Section of the American Chemical Society. The competition included graduate students from Drexel University, Fox Chase Cancer Research Institute, Temple University, Rutgers University, University of Pennsylvania, Widener University. The title of her poster was "Progress Toward Total Synthesis of Fusicoccin A via [4+4] Photocycloaddition"

• Arthur Suits of the Department of Chemistry and Brookhaven National Laboratory has announced the development of a novel imaging method, known as "ion pair imaging spectroscopy," that may help better understand the properties of previously hard-to-study molecules. The new method, featured in the December 21 issue of Science, is comparable to photoelectron spectroscopy, according to Prof. Suits, but instead of ejecting an electron and looking at its energy to determine the energy levels of the ion left behind, it involves ejecting a negatively charged ion and using its energy to determine the energy levels of the positively charged ion left behind.
• A note from Intel Semifinalist, Sherman Jia

Dear Professor Chu and Mr. Wan,Thank you so much for letting me research at SUNY Stonybrook this summer and last summer. The experience was amazing and i really learned a lot. I'm very happy to also tell you that I've just been named an Intel Semifinalist, and I am very grateful for your help. Mr. Wan, you have been an
incredible guide for me and i hope we keep in touch in the future. Professor Chu, I would never have acheived so much if you hadn't helped me in the first place. Thank you both so much!!Sincerely,
Sherman Jia