This fall is going to be different!  In addition to my regular General Chemistry course, I’ll be teaching a new course in my college’s recently redesigned first year seminar program--Food for Thought: The Chemistry of Cooking.  I’m both incredibly excited about this course, and pretty nervous.  I’m excited because it’s not too often (at least at a small college with the usual staffing challenges) that you are handed a blank page and told “teach (almost) anything you want!” I’ve wanted to teach a chemistry of cooking course for a long time, and luckily many others in the chemistry community

but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence - Vince Lombardi. As I reflect on this summer (good grief, I can't believe it is almost time for the fall semester to start) this quote by the legendary coach of the Green Bay Packers seemed very appropriate. First, it reminds me that football season is just around the corner. More importantly it was a message I picked up several different times at BCCE. One of the topics that comes up fairly regularly in meetings of the Leadership Council is the activation barrier to posting on VIPEr.

The Interactive Online Network of Inorganic Chemists did in fact have its start in a seedy airport hotel in Atlanta, just before the Spring 2006 ACS meeting. But that was not its original name—it was going to be the Intellectual Online Network… hang on.  Let me take a few steps back and get you all caught up.

While part of the leadership council was in Evanston running our incredibly successful workshop, Joanne Stewart and I continued the invasion of Canada.

It's been a crazy week for a lot of the leadership council. We have assembled here in beautiful Evanston to host the second NSF-TUES funded faculty development workshop. This week's theme is bioinorganic chemistry, especially how to incorporate it into the undergraduate curriculum.

Greetings all! We are now in the crazy travel period for your VIPEr leadership council. Next week, quite a few of us will be headed to Chicago for our workshop on bioinorganic chemistry, so lots of us are gearing up for that. Joanne Stewart and I will be continuing the IONiC invasion of Canada as we head to ICCE in Toronto that same week. But this week, Adam Johnson, Nancy Williams and I are in Newport at the organometallic Gordon Research Conference. So far it has been an incredible conference.

If you’ve downloaded as many teaching materials from VIPEr as me (or even if you’ve only downloaded a learning object or two), you’ve probably noticed a header or footer on the document that says who wrote it, when it was uploaded, and then some strange text that looks something like this: “This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike License.

This summer, as I worked with four brand new research students on two different synthetic and computational research projects, I was again reminded how easy WebMO makes doing computational chemistry.  WebMO is an inexpensive (free for the basic version) graphical user interface that can be plumbed to a variety of computational packages.

One of my research students is working on a project in which we are doing halide abstraction from a metal center. In theory, she is generating KCl which will precipitate out of the reaction mixture. Sure enough, she gets a precipitate. The solution was filtered and the remaining solid was dried in vacuo. The solid had some slight color to it as well as a heterogenous appearance. When she adds some water most (but certainly not all) of the solid dissolved.