Maggie Geselbracht.

The following was presented at a memorial service for Maggie.

(Adam)

I first met Maggie at the San Diego ACS meeting in 2001 at a symposium on teaching inorganic chemistry in the new century. I remember she spoke about her “Group monograph project,” which I emailed her about after the meeting asking if I could have it to use it in my class. She was happy to share – a promise of things to come. A few years later, I invited her to the seedy airport hotel conference room in Atlanta which was the birthplace of IONiC. Her reply speaks volumes even today:

Dear Adam,
Thanks for your e-mail.  Your proposed workshop sounds fascinating!  And yes, I would be very interested in participating.

I have often thought about ways to gather inorganic chemists to talk about the curriculum and how it differs at various institutions. This seems like a great place to start.  When I was a postdoc at Madison, I attended a meeting of MACTLAC (Midwest Association of Chemistry Teachers at Liberal Arts Colleges), and one of the best aspects of the meeting were the 2 hour disciplinary breakout sessions that brought together Inorganic chemists to talk about textbooks and curricula.  I have always wished there was a similar group on the West Coast although the distances make it a bit more challenging.

I look forward to hearing more about the workshop as your plans develop.  Let me know if you need more information (CV, etc.) from me.

Cheers,

Margret

Maggie was one of the first four leadership council members and her vision helped shape what VIPEr is today. She is personally responsible for the exact eye position of our snakey mascot on the site--she didn’t want the snake to look ‘scary.’ She has posted the most LOs of any contributor to the site. She was full of ideas and had a wonderful way of allowing the leadership council to dream big while staying focused on what was possible. Her grit and determination were fearsome. Just this past summer she was apologizing for not contributing much to VIPEr while lying in a bed in the hospital.

(Barb)

As inorganic chemists, our lives are tied up in the elements of the periodic table.  It is how we organize our stories to understand and remember our world; the table helps us remember the stories of the elements. It also is a way to organize memories of Maggie Geselbracht - Mg - Magnesium.  We'd like to share the stories of how these elements continue to make her memories blaze bright.

S - sulfur - solids
Maggie was a solid state chemist. Not only did she do elegant research on solids, but she was a master of explaining the solid state. Chemistry is a foreign language to many non chemist; chemists see solid state chemistry as a bit of a foreign language. Maggie so elegantly explained the properties of solids to the chemistry community.  Both her fellow solid state chemists and other inorganic chemists have remarked on her ability to translate  complex  ideas like band bending and Fermi levels.

(Adam)

Xe - xenon - Xeplosive.

We can’t possibly remember Maggie without remembering her passion and love for all things noble gas. And explosive.  We have a collection on VIPEr called “So Much Nitrogen: Maggie's Explosive Main Group Compounds.” It seemed like she was always reading some new "inorganic chemistry" article with a title like “wow, we could hardly even hold 5 mg of this compound before it blew up" and having her poor poor first years draw Lewis structures, her poor poor juniors derive MO diagrams, and then she would post it all on ViPEr to share. Although she was a talented and inspiring solid state chemist, I think that secretly (or not so secretly), she wanted to be a noble gas or fluorine chemist.

(Barb)

La - lanthanum - laughter
When Maggie was around, you could count on her to catalyze laughter. I remember her saying things that made me laugh so hard I'd break into tears. In particular, when we first launched ViPEr, we went through a haiku phase. I guess everything is better in verse. And it seems most appropriate to have haiku for the one of the elements I most associate with Maggie, her thesis element, niobium.

Nb - Niobium

niobium smiles

her friends and family here

remember and laugh

(Barb)

Sc - scandium - scouting - with Betsy Jamieson from Smith College

How do you deal with boys? Kieran & Zach - you’re how the two of us who come from families full of girls learned all about

boys. Kieran, maybe that's why your mom told you not to look at the Skype. Betsy and I were unprepared to be the mothers of Cub Scouts.  Luckily for us, Maggie was there with advice, whenever we needed it.  We learned a lot about raising boys, how much they eat, and all that they can accomplish.

(Sheila)

Ge- germanium - geocaching

Geocaching is often described as using multi billion dollar military defense satellites to find tupperware in the woods, a treasure hunt for the technologically savvy.  NbPDX was a master of the hunt, sharing her enthusiasm with her friends, her family, her colleagues, random muggles who caught her in the act.  For the IONiC LC, GZ was wherever Maggie was.  Where do we go from here?  I wish you'd left us coordinates.  

(Anne)

Tb - terbium - from Chip Nataro at Lafayette College

travel bugs

When Maggie fell ill, We decided as a group to send travel bugs to her so that she could watch them move on the map when she couldn't get out and cache. I had never done geocaching before. It took me about 3 hours and 4 different cache sites to finally find one cache. Which would be fine, but this was in weather that was between 0-10 degreesy. But I never once questioned the sanity of doing it.

(Joanne)

Cr - chromium from Lori Watson at Earlham College

crafting

I have many memories of Maggie, from awesome explosive Lewis-dot structures to hearing of hiking and geocaching adventures to our occasional conversations about faith to how to navigate to a restaurant using the, ummm, helpful blue dot on your phone’s map app. But maybe my most highly anticipated interaction was finding pictures of her latest crafting project on the Skype. A costume, an amazing cake, an extraordinary quilt.  They were beautiful!  And done with such precision and care, such a reflection of herself. I saw not only how creative Maggie was, but how caring and generous she was with her time and talents, how much she gave of inner self in her work—and play.  She used crafting, as she used many parts of her life, to build community, to make others feel loved, and important, and included.  To make them family.  When I started my own halting steps into the world of fat quarters and fabric stashes and really cool rulers, Maggie was there to rejoice at my new fabric loves, brainstorm more projects than I can ever think of completing. Even though my Geselbracht number (a quotient we made up to see how close to crafting-Maggie any of us could come) was pretty low, she made me feel like my first attempts were something to rejoice about.  I can’t look at a piece of fun fabric without thinking of what Maggie might do with it, how she would somehow make it into the art that was her gift of weaving people together.  

(Sheila)

Si - silicon - Shitkickers

Maggie was scientist  and mother and artist and woman and Maggie gave me permission to be a  "girl" scientist, with my own funky sense of style, to walk boldly into any room and own it in my funky socks and my own pair of shitkickers as she called them.

(Nancy)

Lv -  livermorium - love
Maggie loved to write questions about all of the elements. Had she taught inorganic chemistry after this had been named, I'm sure she would have written a question about this kalcogenide. (Not chal but kal...) while it's a new element, it reminds me of Maggie for the love she had for people and the way she brought people together and brought out the best in each of every one of us.

(Barb)

But the element that is now forever in our minds is magnesium, Maggie Geselbracht. And I find it fitting to remember her with a chemical haiku on magnesium.

magnesium gone
your memory blazes bright
extinguished too fast