Vote Hernandez for ACS District IV Director

The election for the District IV Director of the American Chemical Society will take place in October, and I'm privileged to be a candidate to for my third and final term. District IV roughly covers the Southeastern United States interpreted broadly, starting from just west of Texas through Georgia and South Carolina to the East. It also includes Oklahoma, and parts of Tennessee and Arkansas all the way to Florida and Puerto Rico to the South. If you are an ACS member, please vote! And if you are in the District IV, I would be honored to have your vote. My platform is available online at http://tinyurl.com/rigoberto4acs. I include below the transcript of the recording that will soon be available on line at the ACS 2019 election website: https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/governance/elections/2019-acs-national-election-information.html.

If you want to see the evolution of my election videos, check out the previous ones at:

https://images.app.goo.gl/nKkRYS3hDAojN5wy8 (2016)

https://images.app.goo.gl/1eUHt8MVPnPNjQaCA (2013)

As for the 2019 election video, here's the transcript:

"Thank you for being a member, and being engaged in our Society. I can barely believe that I started on this journey as your District Director six years ago. Our world was a very different place then, but one thing remains constant. And that is the need for the ACS to advance chemical science and technology in the service of our society, our members and you. I have been privileged to represent your voice on the Board. As a researcher, educator and innovator, I have also brought new perspectives to the Board representing the needs of our diverse mid-career members using our products and services.

I have focused on three of ACS’s core values: The value proposition of ACS membership, science advocacy, and education of the chemical workforce. My efforts in these areas are visible through committee service roles, oral presentations, written articles, and frequent communications with your Council representatives.

The power of the ACS lies in part in a single fact: 150,000 members. Some of us are no longer practicing chemistry in the sense of what we learned directly in school. Yet we continue to be “chemists” —that is, ACS members— because we retain a logic and approach to solving problems that is rooted in our discipline.

Our size helps us in our science advocacy in Congress promoting the support of basic research and development, and scientific literacy in our nation. But it has not stopped me from promoting
the need for private philanthropy of the high-risk, high-reward projects that are essential for future advances.

Of course, all of our work is for naught if we don’t maintain our educational mission. We must support K-12, Project Seed and ACS Scholars as they help train the next generation of chemists. I have also worked to add additional offerings for our life-long members on subjects ranging from managing diversity through my OXIDE program, to mid-career Academic Leadership Training (ALT) workshops.

Finally, in my role on the Board, I have had the opportunity to visit several local sections, including my very own Georgia —23 years and counting!—, Greater Houston, South Florida, Nashville, Puerto Rico and the hosting sections of our regional meetings. So I'm asking for your ideas to help me reimagine our society. I'm asking for your vote so that I can continue to work with you to advance our ACS.

Please find me on twitter, @EveryWhereChemistry, or e-mail me at r.hernandez@acs.org
Remember… Your vote has power only if you use it... "

Using dice, fuzzy or not, to move molecules

This post has been a long tine coming... I wrote it back in May 2015, and somehow in the middle of things, I forgot to hit "publish." While we have done quite a bit of work with this model since then, maybe you'll still enjoy our crazy analogy to playing dice with particles at the mesoscale...

Some time ago, I published what might seem as yet another paper describing the properties of our model for (coarse-grained) large-scale macromolecules. A critical part of the model is that we roll dice every time these particles collide so as to decide whether they bounce or go through each other. They can overlap, because at intermediate length scales, they don't behave like rocks even if they occupy space. Despite our simple (and dicey) model, in our earlier papers, we showed that our particles give rise to the same structure as the corresponding particles that would interact through typical (so-called soft) interactions. But Einstein's famous quote about God not playing dice with the universe (albeit in a different context) serves as a warning that our particles might not move in analogous ways to those driven by Newton's deterministic laws. In our most recent paper, we confirmed that our particles (if they live in one dimension) do recover deterministic dynamics at sufficiently long (that is, coarse-grained) length scales. That's a baby step towards using our model in human-scale (three) dimensions. So there are more papers to come!

The work was performed (and the paper was written) with my recent Ph.D. graduate, Dr. Galen Craven, and a Research Scientist, Dr. Alex Popov. It's basic research and I'm happy to say that It was supported by the National Science Foundation. The title of the article is "Stochastic dynamics of penetrable rods in one dimension: Entangled dynamics and transport properties," and it was recently published at J. Chem. Phys. 142, 154906 (2015).

Engineered gold nanoparticles can be like ice cream scoops covered in chocolate sprinkles

There are many ways to interrogate molecular phenomenon. You might think that this is restricted to physical measurements such as direct observation with a microscope, a laser, or more seemingly arcane observation with nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). But I’m happy to report that observation of computer simulations is yet another, as long as our models are sufficiently accurate that they mimic reality perfectly. In today’s age when it’s hard to see the difference between CGI and real humans, this may not sound surprising. Nevertheless, the question is what can we learn from observation of real and simulated systems in tandem?

I’m happy to report that my student Gene Chong and Cathy Murphy’s student Meng Wu did precisely this parallel study. Gene made simulations of a simpler system, involving nanoparticles covered by lipids called MUTABs. Meng made NMR measurements of nanoparticles covered by a similar but somewhat longer lipids called MTABs. (Note that if you are worried about the term nuclear in NMR, as in nuclear energy, don’t be. We are just looking at the positions of the nuclei, not spitting them apart. It was the concern over this misunderstanding that led to the use of such a device to look at your body in detail to be called MRI instead of NMR!) The happy result was that the two observations agreed. But only together did Meng’s and Gene’s observations show clearly that the lipids didn’t always cover the nanoparticle smoothly like melted chocolate on ice cream, but rather assembled like sprinkles all pointing out in the same direction packed together in different islands on the surface. This structure means that lipid-decorated nanoparticles will have shape and response to other systems that you might not otherwise anticipate. And this opens the question to our next set of investigations as we chart a course to understand the interactions between nanoparticles and biological components such as membranes.

If you want more detail, check out our article in JACS, just recently published!  That is, JACS 141, 4316 (2019), and I'm happy to report that it was funded by the NSF CCI program for our Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology.

Deleted edits from my Comment on diversity and inclusion

When writing a Comment in any magazine, you invariably have a word limit. It's also important to stay on message so that readers won't get lost in the weeds. Thankfully, C&EN has great editors, and it was a pleasure to work with them to write my recent Comment (details at bottom) to help me stay on message. Indeed, while I appreciate the power of blogging and writing unfettered, there is great value in a strong editor. I am thankful that we still have them in the publishing world. In case, though, you want to see some of the weeds that got cut out, here's your sneak peak:

"An evocative triple or triad for managing diversity and advancing inclusive excellence is Support. Compliance, and Adjudication."

"Compliance is necessary in today’s world because we have seen that without it, systems tend to move out of whack, but it tends to be seen to be about protecting an administration from legal attacks."

"Adjudication provides a mechanism to resolve conflicts between aggrieved parties, but who decides which party is in the right or wrong, and how can we be sure that they are fully supporting the individuals fairly."

"Does a member trust us an authoritative source of information? Does a member trust us to prepare them throughout their professional career progression? Does a member trust us even when we tell them that they are wrong? If we are to foster a healthy diversity culture within our Society, we need to be able to do all of this while still being a single organization."

"This [a workshop held at Barnard] included 1-point gains on a 5-point scale on four of the six objectives: (1) the difference and importance of transactional solutions vs. policy solutions as it pertains to managing diversity equity and inclusion, (2)  factors for administering recruitment, mentoring, tenure and promotion processes that advance inclusive excellence, (3) evidence-based strategies for addressing known barriers within a department so as to reduce existing diversity inequities, and (4) supporting and communicating inclusive excellence. Our targeted learning outcomes clearly resonate with the three legs of our managing diversity table and our approach to managing them. "

"The perhaps surprising outcome is that the practices necessary to manage diversity are simply the applications of good management to achieve a targeted outcome, which in this case is inclusive excellence."

"The courses offered by the ACS through the Leadership Advisory Board (LAB) where essential to me as I have developed as a leader, and I’m happy to recommend then to you so as to learn the underlying principles of management."

I also hope that you have a chance to read my recent Comment in C&EN on "Bringing diversity and inclusion to the ACS table." (Volume 97, Issue 9, March 2, 2019) If not, please check it out. Access is free if you are an ACS member. Otherwise, you can use one of your 5 free monthly views... And if you are a chemist, please consider joining.