SVACS

Executive Committee Meeting for Silicon Valley Section - September 2021
2021-09-08 04:00 - 06:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Virtual

ACS Webinar: Skydiving into Retirement: How to Actively Manage the Transition
2021-09-07 20:00 - 21:00 | Virtual
Date: Wednesday, September 8, 2021 @ 2-3pm ET
Speaker: Bill Carroll, Carroll Applied Science
Moderator: Tom Halleran, American Chemical Society
Registration required: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/acs-webinars.html

What You Will Learn:

How your persona changes when you retire
Why it’s important to actively structure your retirement
Some useful tools for retirement success

Co-produced with: ACS Careers

ACS Career Consultant Virtual Office Hours - Special Edition: Industry vs. Academia - What to Expect?
2021-09-02 09:00 - 10:00 | Virtual
Dr. Lori Spangler, ACS Career consultant
Sponsored by the American Chemical Society
9am-10am (Pacific Time), Online via Zoom, Free, Learn more and Register

During this FREE virtual career guidance session, you will gain a better understanding of key differences between working in industry versus academia from ACS’ Certified Career Consultant Lori Spangler. You will also have the chance to get personalized career advice and network in small groups lead by ACS Career Consultants.
This event is free and open to ACS members and non-members, but you must register to save your seat.

How One Company is Making Blue Jeans 'Green'
2021-08-19 04:00 - 05:00 | Virtual
Download and share this colorful poster!
How can engineered bacteria make indigo synthesis and dyeing blue jeans more ecofriendly?

Dr. Tammy Hsu, the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Huue, discusses making sustainable indigo blue for the denim industry so that your favorite piece of clothing can be planet-friendly. The indigo blue currently used to dye jeans, giving them their iconic look, is highly polluting to the environment and made with toxic ingredients. Biosynthetic indigo has five times less toxicity potential and is as effective and easy for jeans-makers to implement.
Huue is working to make biosynthetic indigo the new gold standard for environmentally friendly indigo dye, revolutionizing the color industry with microbe-produced dyes and pigments.
Join us as Dr. Hsu tells us about sustainable textile dyeing and entrepreneurship.

Silicon Valley ACS Annual Picnic and Awards
2021-07-17 16:00 - 18:00 | In-Person in Mountain View at Cuesta Park Group BBQ Areas #1-2, 615 Cuesta Drive, Mountain View, CA, United States
The deadline for registration is Wednesday, July 14, 2021.
Registration is required in order to be sure there’s plenty to eat. Meals will be packaged individually.
We are delighted to announce that our first 2021 in-person event is the annual SVACS July picnic and awards. We will celebrate together with wine- and beer-tasting, good food and awards.
Your safety is our priority. After careful consideration of CDC guidelines, scientific advice, and the ongoing issue of variants, we request all attendees self-certify their vaccine status and encourage all attendees to wear face coverings during the event while not eating or drinking.
In this year of transition back to in-person events, some picnic traditions will be modified. The picnic will be completely outdoors and will last two hours. The awards recognition for fifty- and sixty-year ACS members will be brief and won’t include honorees’ sharing their experiences and stories, so chat them up over wine and dinner! The Radding Award presentation will also be abbreviated.
We are looking forward to meeting in person again.
Download and share the colorful poster

A Muggle’s Guide to Harry Potter’s Chemistry
2021-06-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Virtual
Download Harry Potter’s Chemistry poster to share!
In 2011, University of Nebraska–Lincoln chemistry professor Rebecca Lai was contemplating how to attract more students to the sciences. She had just reread the entire Harry Potter series and it occurred to her: What if she designed a course around the books’ potions and spells?
Thus was born the honors class — A Muggle’s Guide to Harry Potter’s Chemistry. This presentation will cover various elements in our world that are also in Harry Potter’s world, including gold (Au), silver (Ag), mercury (Hg), aluminum (Al), and silicon (Si). The focus will be on the use of these elements in the wizarding world when compared to our world.

Chemical Conundrums in the Movies
2021-05-20 03:00 - 04:00 | Virtual
Mark Griep is a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who has devoted his teaching career to finding ways to engage people in learning more chemistry. Inspired by “Clambake,” an Elvis Presley movie that featured a fast-drying, super-hard varnish called GOOP, Griep began offering “Chemistry in the Movies” presentations to middle school and high school students in 2002. These presentations include “Behind the Scenes of Bubbling Apparatus in the Movies” and “Everything I Know about Chemistry, I learned at the Movies.” Join us as he talks about “Chemical Conundrums in the Movies”. It’s about solving the most difficult chemical puzzles that he found in movies.

Mercury: Magic, Mining, and Menace
2021-04-22 04:00 - 05:00 | Virtual
Dr. Mark Marvin-DiPasquale, USGS
Bio and Abstract and BPT link yet to be provided. Stay tuned!
Mercury

Wastewater-based Epidemiology (WBE) During the COVID-19 Pandemic and into the Future
2021-04-14 03:00 - 04:00 | Virtual
Register to attend this event
Abstract
Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) is quickly gaining traction globally as a tool to assess the COVID-19 pandemic and to inform public health decision-making. With the medical practicalities of testing for SARS-CoV-2 on an individual basis being limited for a variety of reasons, WBE constitutes one potential tool that allows for rapid, comprehensive and recurring data collection to inform evidence-based decision-making. Our team modeled and analyzed the feasibility, economy, opportunities and challenges of tracking COVID-19 locally and globally using WBE, taking into account as key variables factors including air temperature, average in-sewer travel time and per-capita water use. An Arizona case study illustrates that effective surveillance and public health response may occur in a two-step process in which WBE helps to identify and enumerate infected cases, whereafter clinical testing then serves to identify infected individuals in WBE-revealed hotspots. Data provided here demonstrate this approach to save money and be broadly applicable worldwide. WBE brings with it an interesting collaborative, as sewer and water districts are forming new partnerships with public health agencies and medical professionals to aid in the management of public health priorities, thereby helping to accelerate the local, regional, national and global recovery from the pandemic.
Speaker bio
Professor Rolf Halden of Arizona State University (ASU) is Founding Director of the Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering, the nonprofit OneWaterOneHealth, and the ASU startup company, AquaVitas LLC. He has authored over 230 research papers, patents, monographs, and the 2020 popular science book, Environment. Dr. Halden has been invited to brief the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the National Academies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and members of U.S. Congress on environmental health and sustainability challenges. As an expert in wastewater-based epidemiology for tracking harmful chemicals and infectious disease agents, he has lent his expertise to studying the causative agent of the COVID-19 pandemic, SARS-CoV-2.

Why Commercial Tomatoes Have No Taste: The Biochemistry and Genetics of Flavor Preferences
2021-03-18 04:00 - 05:00 | Virtual
Professor Harry Klee of the University of Florida will address the oft heard query in the vegetable section of the supermarket, “Why don’t commercial tomatoes have any taste?” in his talk on the biochemistry and genetics of flavor preferences. Dr. Klee strives to understand the chemical and genetic make-up of “flavor” in fruits and vegetables. His talk will describe how he and his group identify the genes that control syntheses of the flavor volatiles. He’ll then explain how they use this knowledge to produce a better-tasting tomato, thus trying to push the flavor calendar back decades to recapture the characteristics that were present in tomatoes in the first half of the 20th century.
Flyer: Why-Commercial-Tomatoes-Have-No-Taste (PDF)

Tackling Imposter Syndrome
2021-03-11 00:00 - 01:00 | Virtual
Abstract
“I don’t deserve to be here, and everybody knows it.” This is the constant messaging of impostor syndrome – whether you’re starting a new position, winning an award, or being asked to speak at a conference. While few of us talk about it, most of us experience it at some point in our careers. And, the struggles brought on by COVID-19 have only made this worse. However, with the right tools, we can fight back against impostor syndrome and help our friends and colleagues to do the same. This talk will explore the mechanisms by which thoughts of impostor syndrome can form, and how we can work to dismantle them.
Speaker bio
Jen Heemstra received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California, Irvine, in 2000. At Irvine, she performed undergraduate research with Prof. James Nowick investigating the folding of synthetic beta-sheet mimics, which instilled in her a love of supramolecular chemistry. Jen then moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she completed her Ph.D. with Prof. Jeffrey Moore in 2005 studying the reactivity of pyridine-functionalized phenylene ethynylene cavitands. After a brief stint in industry as a medicinal chemist, she moved to Harvard University to pursue postdoctoral research with Prof. David Liu exploring mechanisms for templated nucleic acid synthesis. In 2010, Jen began her independent career in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2016. In 2017, Jen and her research group moved to the Department of Chemistry at Emory University. Research in the Heemstra lab is focused on harnessing the molecular recognition and self-assembly properties of nucleic acids for applications in biosensing and bioimaging.
Outside of work, Jen enjoys spending time with her husband and two sons, as well as rock climbing, cycling, and running. Jen has gained a cult following for her mentoring style on Twitter. Learn more about her in her C&EN column and send her your questions at cenm.ag/office hours.
Flyer: Tackling-Imposter-Syndrome (PDF)

Polymer Chemistry and Lutherie: The Materials of Fretted Instrument
2021-02-18 03:00 - 04:00 | On-Demand
We kick-off this sensory ride with Dr. Steven Pollack who doubles as a science fellow at Carbon, Inc. and a luthier for Yellow Rose Lutherie of Redwood City. In his talk titled, “Polymer Chemistry and Lutherie: The Materials of Fretted Instruments”, he discusses the polymers in the guitar that can influence the quality of the instrument’s sound, both positively and negatively. Damping or enhancing specific frequencies via resonance gives the acoustic guitar its “voice.” Please join us for this melodious talk on 18 February 2021 at 7:00 pm PST.
This presentation was recorded and can be viewed here.

Stereoselective Construction of Challenging C - C Bonds: Total Synthesis of Complex Bioactive Agents
2021-01-21 03:00 - 04:30 | Virtual
Abstract
The central premise of the research in my group focuses on developing novel synthetic transformations that permit the expeditious total synthesis of complex bioactive natural products. A unique and striking feature of the program is the ability to access new chemical reactivity, which in conjunction with detailed mechanistic studies, permits the development of sophisticated multi-component processes for the stereoselective construction of complex molecular architectures.
One of the group’s ongoing goals is developing allylic coupling reactions using rhodium-allyl electrophiles with an array of carbon and heteroatom pronucleophiles. Indeed, this process now represents a powerful and highly regio- and stereoselective sp3 cross-coupling reaction for target-directed synthesis. In recent work, we have focused on the alternative umpolung reaction paradigm, which probes the merit of the corresponding allylic metal anions in the context of novel dynamic kinetic resolution reactions of a,b-unsaturated aldehydes that function as both acyl anions and homoenolates in novel cross-coupling reactions.
In the context of total synthesis, we have recently developed a concise, efficient and scalable total synthesis of the complex bioactive sesquiterpene natural product, Thapsigargin. This agent was isolated from the Mediterranean plant Thapsia garganica and provided a highly selective subnanomolar inhibitor of intracellular calcium ion transport enzymes, which induces apoptosis, leading to cell death. Mipsagargin, a prodrug of Thapsigargin, is currently in the late-stage clinical trials to treat liver, brain, prostate and kidney cancer. The seminar will outline the evolution of these useful developments and their impact on synthetic and medicinal chemistry.
Speaker bio
Andrew Evans is the Alfred R. Bader Chair of Organic Chemistry and a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Organic and Organometallic Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at Queen’s University. He received a B.Sc. with honors in Applied Chemistry at Newcastle Polytechnic in 1987 and a Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1991 under the supervision of Andrew B. Holmes, FRS. He then completed postdoctoral studies with Philip D. Magnus, FRS, at the University of Texas at Austin as a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow. In 1993, he initiated his independent career at the University of Delaware, where he rose through the ranks to Professor before moving to Indiana University in 2001. In 2006, he moved to the University of Liverpool, where he was the Heath Harrison Chair of Organic Chemistry, before moving to his current position in July 2012.
His research accomplishments have been globally recognized, including the Changjiang Scholar Award, ACS Cope Scholar Award, ACS Fellow, RSC Pedler Award, the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award, Pfizer Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry, Johnson and Johnson Focused Giving Award, GlaxoWellcome Chemistry Scholar Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Eli Lilly Grantee Award and Zeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award. He has also served on ACS Division of Organic Chemistry as a Member-at-Large, National Organic Symposium Executive Officer, Councilor and Division Chair. He currently serves as one of the co-chairs of the highly acclaimed ACS-DOC Graduate Research Symposium. Additionally, he is an Associate Editor for the Thieme journal, Synthesis and the Editor-in- Chief for Organic Reactions.

ChemLuminary Awards
2020-12-09 12:00 - 15:00 | CA
The 22nd Annual ChemLuminary Awards ceremony will be held virtually and will include a keynote address by Janet L. Bryant, recipient of the 2020 Award for Volunteer Service to the American Chemical Society, and the presentations of awards given by 23 committees of the Society will follow.
The Silicon Valley Local ACS Section has been selected as a finalist for the following ChemLuminary Awards for activities held in 2019:

Outstanding Local Section Career Program
Outstanding New Local Section Younger Chemists Committee
Best Activity or Program Highlighting ACS Change Drivers or Strategic Planning
Outstanding Local Section Industry Event
Outstanding Performance by a Local Section (Large Size)
Membership Affairs Committee Industry Engagement & Outreach
Best New Senior Chemists Activity within a Local Section

Award-winning Local Sections, Technical Divisions, International Chapters, and Regional Meetings will receive a $500 cash prize and a ChemLuminary award plaque that will be shipped immediately following the ceremony.
Registration is complimentary. Attendees will receive an access code to enter the event.
Virtual ceremony registration

From Plant Scents to Perfumes
2020-11-12 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual
Abstract
Plant scents from flowers, fruits, leaves, or tree barks are composed of complex mixtures of volatile organic compounds. People have used these fragrant mixtures since ancient times to produce lotions, oils and perfumes. While contemporary perfumes and other scented products consist, to a large extent, of synthetic materials, the inspiration for their components came mostly from natural compounds. In this presentation, we’ll look at the compositions of some familiar plant scents, including their functions, and at typical structures of some of the compounds that compose them. From plant scents, we’ll continue to fragrances and products that people today use in their daily lives, such as shampoos, soaps, or expensive perfumes. This will include a look at synthetic compounds and mixtures that are used nowadays.

Speaker bio
Margareta (Greti) Séquin has a Ph. D. in organic chemistry from the University of Basel in Switzerland, did postdoctoral work at Princeton University and at the Technical University of Munich, and has taught organic chemistry at Dominican University and at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years. She has been giving many presentations on plant chemistry topics at botanical gardens and science centers. As an active member of the ACS California Section she participates in public events with hands-on activities on plant chemistry for general audiences. Because of her great interest in plants she has been a long-time docent at the Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley, CA (more information about this park). Margareta is the author of the books The Chemistry of Plants: Perfumes, Pigments, and Poisons and The Chemistry of Plants and Insects: Plants, Bugs, and Molecules, published by RSC, Cambridge, UK

Chemistry in the Kitchen: Promoting Appreciation of Chemistry and Science
2020-02-20 02:00 - 05:00 | In-Person in Mountain View at Cuesta Park Group BBQ Areas #1-2, 615 Cuesta Drive, Mountain View, CA, United States
Professor Richard Zare, Stanford Chemistry Department
Abstract: For the past three years, I have been offering a course to Stanford freshmen titled “Chemistry in the Kitchen.” Students are told the following before signing up for this course: This course examines the chemistry relevant to food and drink preparation, both in homes and in restaurants, which makes what we consume more pleasurable. Good cooking is more often considered an art rather than a science, but a small bit of understanding goes a long way to make the preparation and consumption of food and drink more enjoyable. The intention is to have demonstrations and tastings as a part of every class meeting. We will examine some rather familiar items in this course: eggs, dairy products, meats, breads, vegetables, pastries, and carbonated beverages. We shall playfully explore the chemistry that turns food into meals. A high-school chemistry background is assumed; bring to class a good appetite and a healthy curiosity.
My goal has not been to make Iron Chefs or chemistry majors from those who take this course but instead to have the students learn how the science behind cooking can greatly increase their enjoyment of food. This lecture gives me the opportunity to tell you how this course came about and what aspects about the course make it a very popular course here at Stanford in which students leave the course with a new sense of the importance of chemistry in their daily lives.
Bio: Richard N. Zare is the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor of Natural Science. His website: www.stanford.edu/group/Zarelab contains more than you probably want to know about him and current research interests. He is particularly proud to have received the National Medal of Science in 1983 and the Presidential Award for Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring in 2012. He also received the Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry in 1999, the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2005, the ACS Priestley Medal in 2010, the King Faisal International Prize in Science in 2011, and the Othmer Gold medal in 2017.
