Be sure to sign up for the IONiC VIPEr sessions...

With apologies to Scott McKenzie.

Hello loyal snakelings. I hope the new semester has gotten off to a good start for you. In case you were not aware, submissions for the spring ACS meeting in San Francisco are now open. Once again, IONiC will be sponsoring the Undergraduate Research at the Frontiers of Inorganic Chemistry sessions at this meeting. You can find the submission page here. Your hosts, Anne Bentley, Sheila Smith and Chip Nataro, anticipate four excellent oral sessions as well as a poster session. We also expect to have a social hour and we will be announcing more details about that as we get closer to the meeting.

I did want to pass along a little information that we received from Steve Koch about the abstract submission process that will be especially relevant to this community. When submitting, your undergraduates should encounter a warning: Undergraduate Students: Submit papers to Undergraduate Research symposia in the [CHED] Division of Chemical Education, unless otherwise directed by your advisor. Of course we want undergraduates presenting in our poster sessions, so they should submit their poster abstracts to us. And as always we welcome your best students to submit abstracts for consideration as oral presentations. Just a reminder, these talks should be very polished and present high quality research as they are part of the oral sessions of the division of inorganic chemistry. Please be sure to emphasize to your students where you want them to submit their abstracts.

As in the past, we will likely have to limit our oral sessions to include only one presentation per research group. I look forward to seeing you in April; hopefully Chip isn’t giving a talk so I can just sit on the lectern and pay attention to all of the great talks.