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... "

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.

On celebrating my 11th and last Herty Medal Dinner as Host

The Georgia Local Section of the American Chemical Society has a deep history in recognizing research and service toward the advancement of chemistry in the nation’s service. The first of the Herty Medals was awarded in 1933 to Fred Allison. Charles Herty was honored with the award in the following year. As of September 16th of this year, we have now awarded 82 gold medals to deserving chemists in the southeastern United States. The most recent Medalist was Prof. Brooks Pate from the University of Virginia who was recognized for "his work in revolutionizing molecular rotational spectroscopy and its applications in astrochemistry and analytical chemistry and for his service in mentoring diverse students through a summer undergraduate research program.” His seminar illustrated how his key insight of spectral theory allowed him to develop an approach for capturing the spectra in a single experiment rather than using a series of single frequency measurements. The speed and accuracy of this technique has played a key role in reimagining the field of astrochemistry.

On a personal level, I was pleased to see Brooks again after we had been lab mates in Kevin Lehmann’s laboratory at Princeton. I was an undergraduate while I saw him sail through his candidacy exams. On a different personal level, this most recent Herty Medal dinner also marked the eleventh and last dinner for which I chaired the corresponding selection committee. The list of nominees is outstanding and this made settling on a finalist all the more difficult each and every year. Nevertheless, with the able help of my committee colleagues, we developed a process that allowed us to sort through the nominees carefullly and thoughtfully. We pre-screened all of them electronically prior to our in-person meeting. The two- to three- hour discussion led to a deeper understanding of the candidates, and often resulted in a final choice which our individual assessments had rarely predicted. During my term as Chair of the Herty Medal Selection Committee, we also had the opportunity to do up the 75th Herty Medal celebration. For the fist and only time, we have nearly 15 Herty Medalists return to Atlanta to commemorate them and chemistry in the Southeastern United States. We staged several one-time activities reaching out to students and professionals of all ages. We founded the Herty Medal Undergraduate Research Symposium (HMURS), and it continues to support our Section’s diverse undergraduates. I am thus very proud of what our Section has accomplished, and thankful to the section for letting me be a part of it. I also look forward to celebrating the 100th Herty Medalist in 2034. Mark your calendars now!

The talking head video for my District IV Director campaign

You may recall my recent post on the making of a video segment for my District IV Director election campaign. Well now you can see it...

Check it out here!

And the election window is coming up... It runs from October 1 to October 30! So if you are an ACS Member living in the SouthEast please vote. Whether you vote for me or not, I will be happy to represent you, if elected. I also welcome your thoughts on how to mate the American Chemical Society a better society for all of us!

District IV Director's Candidate Statement in CEN

As some of you may know, I am running to continue into my second term on the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society (ACS). The candidate statements have just appeared in the September 12th issue of C&EN, and I reproduce mine below. The text is also available on my website. If you are a member of the ACS and a member of District IV (roughly in the SouthEast of the US), I would very much appreciate your vote!

Some of you may wonder why I volunteer for the ACS. After all, it takes roughly 160 hours of my time each year to serve the ACS as a Director. That's time that I could be devoting to my research, my students, or (most importantly) my family. Yes, like you, I multi-task and make it work. But the question is why? And the answer is simply that it gives me the opportunity to shape our ACS into a society that works for all of us. My roles as an active research professor, who engages in grants and contracts from government agencies, foundations and industry, gives me currency in the use of many of our offerings. I see directly (through my undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral) students the impact of our career services. As a computational chemist and journal author, I am directly familiar with our journals and electronic platforms for communication. Unfortunately, the Board has traditionally been under-represented by members who are still active in their careers and could provide a balancing perspective for the emerging challenges to our members and our society. For this reason I have felt compelled to serve you on the Board, and I ask that you vote for me so that I may continue doing so.

My Candidate Statement:

The most important element in ACS membership is you. Every one of us, cross-linked together through ACS, makes up a personal and professional chemistry network that we can leverage to advance our careers, each other, and chemistry as a whole. Through ACS, we can celebrate that chemistry has a human side, and it must be diverse. The challenge lies in continuing to adapt our structure and our offerings to best serve the broad needs of our fellowship. This is a challenge that cannot be solved once and for all because we, and the world around us, are constantly changing. The opportunity for advancing the interaction and support of chemical scientists like you is what drove me to volunteer to serve as district director, and it is why I would like to continue for another term.  

Ihave focused on three of ACS’s core values: the value proposition of ACS membership, education of the chemical workforce, and science advocacy. The diversity in age, experience, background, worldwide location, race, ethnicity, gender identity and orientation, and ability that makes our fellowship stronger must be addressed through these values and everything we do. My championing of diversity equity on task forces and boards and as the director of OXIDE (Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity) demonstrates my strong commitment to advancing these critical issues within the chemical workforce. As a director, I have spoken with many of you at regional and national meetings, and I wrote two comments inI have focused on three of ACS’s core values: the value proposition of ACS membership, education of the chemical workforce, and science advocacy. The diversity in age, experience, background, worldwide location, race, ethnicity, gender identity and orientation, and ability that makes our fellowship stronger must be addressed through these values and everything we do. My championing of diversity equity on task forces and boards and as the director of OXIDE (Open Chemistry Collaborative in Diversity Equity) demonstrates my strong commitment to advancing these critical issues within the chemical workforce. As a director, I have spoken with many of you at regional and national meetings, and I wrote two comments in C&EN—July 14, 2014, pg. 45 and August 24, 2015, pg. 40,—promoting diversity equity and inclusive excellence.

ACS remains as relevant and necessary today as when it was founded, despite the flattening in accessing information through the internet. As members, you and I are voting affirmatively with our wallets, declaring that chemistry and our network are important. Through this collective action, we are empowering ourselves as a force for change in areas such as energy, sustainability and human health. Nevertheless, our Society, like many others, is facing the challenge of decreasing membership. This is a tide that we must stem. Our size gives us the diversity we need to advance our science. It also signifies a vote of confidence for all of our advocacy and outreach activities. As an ACS Director, I will remain a strong proponent for providing clarity to the value proposition of our membership to each of our present and future members.

Diversity of the emerging chemical workforce translates into a need for using multiple mechanisms in and out of the classroom to engage students in the educational process. As a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer, I have had the opportunity to engage, motivate, and mentor undergraduates though campus visits that provide small-group interactions going well beyond my classroom. (Check out undergraduate Linsey Liles’ recap of my visit to the University of the South in the Key Reporter.) If elected, I hope to continue such visits by engaging local chapters as hosts. I am also keenly aware for the need to continue professional education. I have been involved as a facilitator in the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative New Faculty Workshop (C&EN, March 24, 2014, pg. 36). I am also leading a team organizing the Academic Leadership Workshop aimed at supporting midcareer faculty to become university administrators or research directors (C&EN, March 7, 2016, pg. 47). These programs illustrate the power of ACS to catalyze educational opportunities for chemical scientists throughout our lives.

Advances in chemical science and innovation depend critically on public and private support. Advocacy for such efforts can succeed only if we make our science understandable to the public. It is particularly critical for advancing high-risk, high-potential science that tends to receive less funding when budgets are tight (C&EN, September 21, 2015, pg. 33). Again, ACS as a professional society is uniquely positioned to provide current understanding of science and to advocate for the chemical challenges that still remain to be understood. I have enjoyed working with ACS staff in advocating for chemical science and the people who do that work.


Through these priorities, I will aim to help our society become a better home for ts members and a more effective partner to the world. The resonating thread that we must advance through these and other initiatives is you. ACS programs can be effective only if they serve your needs and advance your goals. To this end, I look forward to hearing from you through links at http://tinyurl.com/hernandez4acs to learn more about how to make our ACS fellowship even stronger. I also ask for your vote so that I may continue to work with you and our fellow ACS members to improve your ACS. 

Video Segment on my Candidacy for District IV Director

This Fall, I am running to continue into my second term on the Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society (ACS). As part of our effort to communicate with members, a 2-3 minute video segment of me discussing my vision for the ACS was just recorded today. I'm including the transcript of that statement below so as to give you a spoiler for the video! Feel free to send me your thoughts and suggestions for increasing the value of the ACS to you and chemistry broadly. If you are a member of the ACS and a member of District IV (roughly in the SouthEast of the US), I would also very much appreciate your vote!

Here's the transcript:

The most important element in ACS membership is you. Together we form a personal and professional chemistry network that we all leverage to advance our careers, each other, and chemistry as a whole. Through ACS we celebrate the technical and human sides of chemistry, and both must be diverse. 

The challenge lies in continuing to adapt our structure and our offerings to best serve the broad needs of hour fellowship. This is a challenge that cannot be solved once and for all because we and the world around us are constantly changing. The opportunity for advancing the interaction and support of chemical scientists like you is what drove me to volunteer to serve as District Director, and it is why I would like to continue for another term.

I have focused on three of ACS’s core values: The value proposition of ACS membership, Education of the chemical workforce, and Science advocacy. The diversity in age, experience, backgrounds, world-wide location, race, ethnicity, gender identity and orientation, and special abilities that makes our fellowship stronger must be addressed through everything we do. My championing of diversity equity on task forces, boards and as the OXIDE Director demonstrates my strong commitment to advancing these critical issues within the chemical workforce. As a Director, I have spoken with many of you at regional and national meetings. I have written several comments in C&EN, promoting diversity equity and inclusive excellence, the integration of teaching and research, and advocacy for public understanding and financial support of the chemical sciences. 

The ACS promotes and advances chemical science and innovation through its on-line platforms, journals, abstract services, conferences, and more. The ACS is also here to help you and all of its members grow professionally through our myriad of educational offerings. All of these programs and offerings are critical in establishing a marketplace of ideas to which you as a member have a privileged entrée while benefiting from the broad scope or our large membership. As a member-driven society, none of these things can happen without you. So I ask that you join me in advancing our society. Contact me electronically or personally through the links at tinyurl.com/hernandez4acs follow me on twitter at EveryWhereChem, or read my posts at EveryWhereChemistry.blogspot.com. VOTE for me, Rigoberto Hernandez, so that I may work with you and our fellow members to advance your ACS.

Remember… Every Vote Counts!

Q&A on balancing activities in research and #OutsideTheLab

I was recently interviewed by Dr. Antara Dutta from Georgia State University for an on-line story by the ACS Georgia Local Section as part of their series to promote volunteer leaders in the American Chemical Society. The questions and answers are more about how I do what I do, and may be of use to you if you are thinking about balancing your professional and volunteer tasks...

1. What do you like most about your job? What are the most challenging parts of your job?
What I like most about my job is that I can learn something new every day, and that I also can make an impact on the lives of students, colleagues, and beyond. In this sense, the day is never done as there is always something more that I could have done. Thus the challenging part is knowing when to stop.

2. What characteristic do you associate with a good chemist?
Recalling that “chance favors the prepared mind,” it is clear that a good chemist must be both diligent and careful in their preparation, but imaginative in the construction and interpretation of everything they do.

3. How have you grown professionally through your career? How did you choose your professional career growth path?
I have been fortunate to meet great chemists who mentored me and guided me not just on my chemistry, but  also on how to manage my chemistry.  For example, Bob Lichter has been an amazing mentor helping me to integrate my broadening participation efforts with my scientific program.

4. How do you face and overcome your professional challenges?
I ask for help and I work harder.

5. What are your habits have you adopted to ensure professional success? For example, do you have a daily routine or practice that helps you to be successful?
I exercise every day to ensure that my mind and body stay healthy. I also reserve Monday’s and Wednesday’s for after school pickup of my son from his school and rarely schedule something else over them, unless I’m travelling. This ensures that I have quality time with my son.

6. How do you handle failures, either major or min, both professionally and in research?
As an academic, failure is inevitable because noone wins every grant competition. So I look at such failures as an opportunity to grow. That is, I learn from the rejections (by leveraging the written comments from reviewers and discussions with program managers), and I try again.

7. Who has inspired you professionally or personally and why?
My friends, Peter Stang and Dick Zare, are remarkable in their ability to balance their research programs and their activities to advance our profession.  They are living existence proofs that you can both serve others and pursue research, and it helps me to not give up hope that I can do both as well.

8. What are your thoughts on your growth especially in this digital age? What transformation do you see in the field of chemistry from the way you have learned the subject and it is today in this digital age? 
The promise of computers in chemistry is multi-fold. On the one hand, it provides the ability to amass a lot of data for which analytics tools can find unexpected correlations and solutions. On the other hand, it provides a platform on which we can code ever more accurate models of complex chemistry for which calculations and simulations can reveal chemistries that we had not anticipated earlier. Across this range, the power of computers thus offers us an opportunity to do chemistry differently just as, for example, combinatorial chemistry tools have already transformed discovery.

9. What hobbies or activities do you participate in outside of your professional life?
I have been running with my wife since just after I received tenure. In addition, since my son was four years-old, we have been training in Tae Kwon do together, taking all of our belt tests together, and we earned our Kukkiwon-certified 3rd degree black belts together. Running and Tae Kwon Do have been important for my health, but equally importantly they continue to provide me quality time with my family.

10. Do you have any closing thoughts you’d like to share?
Much of what I have related involves the importance of interacting with people, both to help them and be helped by them. I have found many of my friends and colleagues through the American Chemical Society, and the value of my membership comes primarily from the fact that we are a society of like-minded chemical scientists and engineers. I encourage you to engage with other members at our local section meetings, our regional meetings, our national meetings, and on various on-line platforms. I am sure that you and I will both benefit from your greater engagement!

Chemistry's Community Spaces

There was a time when book stores and libraries were the places where you met others. Like in today's universities, in which librarians can't get rid of books fast enough, students still go to libraries to study in their carrels. Unfortunately, the flattening of the printed word through electronic delivery is decreasing the need or motivation for you to physically visit bookstores or public libraries. Meanwhile, next-day (and next-hour!) deliveries de-motivate you from going to retail shops at your local mall. But we still need community spaces, like the Mexican zocalos, to see and meet other people. Coffee houses and fitness centers, necessarily serve products or services that you and others must experience physically, and are increasingly serving the need for community gathering spaces while proving that brick-and-mortar can still be profitable.

So where do chemists gather? Increasingly academic buildings are being created with coffee houses in mind. Sure, it's cheaper for me to make an espresso with the machine in my office. But if I walk down to the coffee shop, I have the extra benefit of running into students and colleagues. The upcoming National Meeting of the ACS in San Diego also serves this need. Going there, I get to hang out with over 15,000 of my closest friends. I can't, obviously, see them all, but I don't have to make many, if any, appointments. The chemists with whom I have common interests naturally attend the same receptions, governance meetings and scientific sessions. These chance run-ins are devilishly short and sweet. The follow-up often occupies my activities and seeds my next innovations over the next six months and beyond.

Of course, old and new gathering mechanisms can overlap. In San Diego, the Multidisciplinary Program Planning Group (MPPG) selected Computers in Chemistry as the theme. Working with my colleagues on the associated symposia, we introduced a special break from 10:00 AM to 10:30AM on mornings from Sunday to Wednesday called "Café con Ordenadores." We hope to leverage your need for coffee to discuss how computers can enable your chemistry. I look forward to my chance meeting(s) with you in San Diego starting on March 13th!

Check out my old post on some tips for making a large conference, like the ACS meeting, feel exactly like the small conference you want to attend.

This post was reprinted on the Sustainable Nano Blog on March 8, 2016. 

Sustainable Nano on Open Access Sustainably

(This article is a cross-post between EveryWhereChemistry and Sustainable-Nano!)

Sustainability’s future is now. Our recent article was just published in an all-electronic journal, ACS Central Science, which is among the first of the American Chemical Society (ACS) journals offered without a print option. It therefore embodies sustainability as it requires no paper resources, thereby limiting the journal’s carbon footprint to only what is required for maintaining the information electronically in perpetuity. It is also completely Open Access, which means our article is available for all to read. Does this equal accessibility (called “flat” because there is no hierarchy in levels of access) amount to yet another layer of sustainability? More on that question in a moment. Meanwhile as the article itself is about sustainability, it embodies the repetitive word play in the title of this post.

But there is another double meaning in the publishing of this work: The flatness underlying the vision of Open Access is also at play in how the work was done. ELEVEN different research groups were involved in formulating the ideas and writing the paper. This lot provided tremendous breadth of expertise, but the flatness in the organizational effort allowed us to merge it all together. Of course, it wouldn’t have happened without significant leadership, and Cathy Murphy, the paper’s first author, orchestrated us all magnificently. While flatness in organizational behavior isn’t typically considered part of sustainability, in this case it provided for the efficient utilization of resources (that is, ideas) across a broader cohort.

So what is our article about? Fifteen years into the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that we need to develop new materials to solve the grand challenges that confront us in the areas of health, energy, and the environment. Nanoparticles are playing a significant role in new material development because they can provide human-scale effects with relatively small amounts of materials. The danger is that because of their special properties, the use of nanoparticles may have unintended consequences. Thus, many in the scientific community, including those of us involved in writing this article, are concerned with identifying rules for the design and fabrication of nanoparticles that will limit such negative effects, and hence make the particles sustainable by design. In our article, we propose that the solution of this grand challenge hinges on four critical needs:

1. Chemically Driven Understanding of the Molecular Nature of Engineered Nanoparticles in Complex, Realistic Environments
2. Real-Time Measurements of Nanomaterial Interaction with Living Cells and Organisms That Provide Chemical Information at Nanometer Length Scales To Yield Invaluable Mechanistic Insight and Improve Predictive Understanding of the Nano−Bio Interface.
3. Delineation of Molecular Modes of Action for Nanomaterial Effects on Living Systems as Functions of Nanomaterial Properties
4. Computation and Simulation of the Nano−Bio Interface.

In more accessible terms, this translates to: (1) It’s not enough to know how the nanoparticles behave in a test tube under clean conditions as we need to know how they might behave at the molecular scale in different solutions. (2) We also need to better understand and measure the effects of nanoparticles at contact points between inorganic materials and biological matter. (3) Not only do we need to observe how nanoparticles behave in relation to living systems, but to understand what drives that behavior at a molecular level. (4) In order to accelerate design and discovery as well as to avoid the use of materials whenever possible, we also need to design validated computational models for all of these processes.

Take a look at the article for the details as we collectively offer a blueprint for what research problems need to be solved in the short term (a decade or so), and how our team of nanoscientists, with broad experience in making, measuring, and simulating nanoparticles in complex environments, can make a difference.

The title of the article is "Biological Responses to Engineered Nanomaterials: Needs for the Next Decade.” The work was funded by the NSF as part of the Phase I Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology (CSN, CHE-124051). It was just released at ACS Central Science, XXXX (2015) as an ASAP Article. The author list is C. Murphy, A. Vartanian, F. Geiger, R. Hamers, J. Pedersen, Q. Cui, C. Haynes, E. Carlson, R. Hernandez, R. Klaper, G. Orr, and Z. Rosenzweig,

It’s available as Open Access right now at http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acscentsci.5b00182

Building Pillars of MesoScale Particles on a Surface

Let’s build layers of (macromolecular) material on a surface. If the material were lego pieces, then the amount of coverage at any given point would be precisely the number that fell there and connected (interlocked). In the simplest cases, you might imagine the same type of construction on a macromolecular scale surface with nano sized bricks. The trouble is that at that small length scale, particles are no longer rigid. The possibility of such softness allows for higher density layers and even a lack of certainty as to which layer you are in. This leads to a roughness in the surface due to the fact that the soft legos stack more in some places than others. Moreover, there will be regions without any legos at all which means that the surface will not be completely covered. This led us to ask: What is the surface coverage as a function of the amount of macromolecular material coated on the surface and the degree of softness of that material?

As in our recent work using tricked-up hard particles, we wondered whether we could answer this question without using explicit soft particle interactions. It does, indeed, appear to work in the sense that we are able to capture the differences in coverage of the surface between a metastable coverage in which particles once trapped at a site remain there, and the relaxed coverage in which particles are allowed to spread across the surface. We also found that relaxation leads to reduced coverage fractions rather than larger coverage as one might have expected a spreading of particles due to the relaxation.

This work was performed by my graduate student, Dr. Galen Craven, in collaboration with a research scientist in my group, Dr. Alex Popov. The title of the article is "Effective surface coverage of coarse grained soft matter.” The work was funded by the NSF. It was published on-line in J. Phys. Chem. B back in July, and I’ve been waiting to write this post hoping that it would hit the presses. Unfrotunately, it’s part of a Special Issue on Spectroscopy of Nano- and Biomaterials which hasn’t quite yet been published. But I hope that it will be soon! Click on the doi link to access the article.

Music and Chemistry in Nashville

This weekend, I had an opportunity to do something I have never done before. I introduced the band. SERMACS2014 managed to snag one of the hottest tickets in town. The SteelDrivers have been nominated for three Grammies, four IBMA awards and the Americana Music Association’s New Artist of the Year award. It was yet another sign of the prescient organization of the SERMACS2014 organizing committee that they signed them two years ago.

They were also quite clever in finding a band whose songs encoded a chemical twist. When the SteelDrivers sing one of their hits, "Wearin' a hole in a Honky Tonk floor," I imagine hole transport on graphene. The song even includes a chemical safety twist. In the lyric, "this old bar room suits me fine," I'm envisioning lab coats in front of a fume hood. That is, it's easy to see chemistry wherever you look. On the flip side, Sir Harry Kroto's keynote remarks at SERMACS2014, pointed out that his identification of the C60 structure was made possible by his early exposure to graphic arts and R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome at the World's Fair. Which is to say that it is equally easy to find art in the science that we do. Meanwhile, the SteelDrivers also seemed amused over my opening remarks about their music. At least, they pretended to be as they introduced their song with a line about the newfound chemistry that it evidently contained. Truly bluegrass and chemistry were following the same beat... but alas, I still don't know how to two-step.

So thank you to the Nashville Section of the ACS for staging a great SERMACS, and for helping me find some cool chemistry in bluegrass!

Advice to high school students ...

Through high school, you are mostly taught the facts. As an undergraduate, you are taught to teach yourself the facts and how to construct answers to questions. In graduate or professional school, you are taught how to ask the right questions. The irony in this construction lies in the common misconception that Ph.D.s know all the answers, when in fact they mostly know the gaps in knowledge. That is, Socrates was not being so humble with his oft quoted saying, "the more I learn, the more I learn how little I know."

At the recent Herty Medal Award Dinner hosted by the Georgia Local Section of the ACS, I was pleased that nearly an entire table was filled by AP Chemistry students from Luella High School in Henry County. One of them asked our medalist, Luigi Marzilli, for advice on her way to college. I took the liberty of conveying the stages I described above. My point is that the mode of learning undergoes a paradigm shift in going from high school to college. My advice to students is thus to be aware of this change and be deliberate in changing their study habits. Indeed students often struggle as they approach the cliff on the edge of what they know coming from high school and the large body of new material that they are now expected to know in a college class. They often respond by trying to memorize every new fact and figure, but the shear magnitude of data makes such a path difficult to follow. Instead, they need to learn the material conceptually so that they can readily process the problems they face on exams and beyond. This requires practicing the problems and making the connections between the concepts steadily through the term, not in a single cramming session the night before the exam!

Lost in Projection

Life is full of cycles. For the American Chemical Society (ACS), there’s a National Meeting held every 6 months. With that as my time constant, it feels as if it was just the other day that I gave the Keynote Lecture at the ACS Committee on Minority Affairs Luncheon at the last National Meeting in Dallas. Last March, I framed my remarks through the title of this post. I knew that it was a good title because my wife liked it. But she also wondered what in the world I would talk about under such a title. This seemed fortuitous. It meant that I could say nearly anything without disappointing the audience. After all, they couldn't possibly have any expectations. In truth, the title wasn’t advertised as evidence by the large turnout.

What is lost in the projection of how others frame you? That is, there is a potential disconnect between what others expect of you and the person who you believe yourself. To what extent are you bound by what others expect of you? Such expectations may arise from how others have seen you in the past or perhaps by who they see on first impression. I came to the United States as a child, a Cuban immigrant who spoke no English but proud to be able to count from one to ten without too much of an accent. Children grow and learn so surely I cannot be bound by that early frame. As adults, we may not grow physically, but we also learn. And yet, we have a tendency to hold others to the frames that we first see of them. Even more dangerous to each of us is the fact that the frame is often projected onto us by others, and not always correctly. There were several young scientists in the room. During the question and answer period, they echoed the angst of having felt bound by such projections in the past. I hope that I succeeded in encouraging them to find their way in breaking those projections and choosing their own frame.

The cycle continues this weekend with the start of the ACS meeting in San Francisco. If you are here, I encourage you to go to Monday’s CMA Luncheon where Madeleine Jacobs will be speaking. The issue of implicit bias and the effects that has on academic careers will also be a large piece of the Symposium on Advancing the Chemical Sciences Through Diversity to be held at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel all-day on Tuesday. I hope to see you there!

Inclusive excellence symposium coming up at ACS San Francisco

Two qualifiers, successful and diverse, for the research enterprise are inseparable concepts. And yet, some members in the scientific community have often treated them as orthogonal if not outright destructively interfering. (Please forgive my geek speak here!) I think that the only part that is destructive is the failure to be inclusive. Indeed, as we are broadening participation in the chemical research enterprise, we are drawing more and better talent from all over the world and this should include that which is within our borders. Unfortunately, we aren't quite there yet as is visible through the existing imbalance in the demographics between the US population and the chemical workforce. Achieving parity requires us to be actively engaged.

To this end, I just published a Comment in C&EN to advertise the upcoming symposium on "Advancing the Chemical Sciences Through Diversity in Participation." (Earlier, I wrote on this blog about why I publish there and here. You can also check out the ChemDiversity Blog post advertising the symposium.) If you happen to be in San Francisco in mid August, feel free to join us at the Hilton near Union Square. You'll learn a few tips for advancing inclusive excellence and you'll be in the middle of San Francisco. Hard to beat that pairing!

Check out the Comment on page 45 of the July 14, 2014 C&EN at this link. (Apologies if it's closed to ACS members and subscribers only.)

On my experience delivering a webinar...

I recently participated as a speaker in a Webinar for the American Chemical Society (ACS.) It was only the second webinar that I have delivered. My first was held on January 2013 as part of the monthly meeting series of the Lehigh Valley Local section of the ACS. They were an early adopter of the medium. That is, they were quick to figure out that it's cost effective to host speakers from a distance while also addressing a greater number of their members. The latter is particularly important to them because they cover a large geographic area placing any particular choice of meeting location too far from most of their members. My host, Lorena Tribe, helped me learn how to use questions through the presentation effectively in order to engage their web audience. I found the technique to be so successful that I have retained and used the questions (in think-pair-share style) as I present our work (on the energetics of proteins) at department seminars.

As a consequence, when I was asked to participate in the ACS Webinar, I was initially not phased by the opportunity. That is, until I learned that the audience would include nearly 400 participants. Fortunately, the ACS staff was similarly awesome. They provided all the necessary infrastructure and great user support. All I had to do was put my slides together just like I do for any other seminar. The inclusion of my industrial collaborator, Stephen Quirk, framed my otherwise academic discussion into one that was more accessible for a broader (viz. industrial) audience. Plus he did all the hard work of selecting the questions for me to answer during the Q and A. All-in-all my total time investment was probably less than four hours. Moreover, we reached a large audience and one that I probably would not have "seen" otherwise. That's a high benefit to cost ratio which I consider a big win.

If you missed my Webinar on "Digitally Pulling Proteins: Molecular Dynamics Simulations," you might still be able to hear it at http://acswebinars.org/digital-proteins. At present, it's available only for view by ACS members.

Old-World Publishing in the New Age

Through the web, we can self-publish pretty much anything at any time. This doesn't guarantee, however, that anyone will read it. Actually no venue can guarantee that. Old world platforms such as newspapers, trade publications and journals do have a circulation among their audiences that effectively guarantee a certain number of page views. On the other hand, all-electronic open access journals can serve as such amplifiers as well. Some blogs have become so popular that their number of page views exhibit viral-like growth. So why should anyone publish on the old-world platforms?

That's a loaded question, and truly one that has many possible good arguments to support it. I'll rest on providing one answer by example.  I recently published a Comment in C&EN. The piece was quite a bit longer than my usual blog post. As such, it would have been appropriate for my EveryWhereChem blog only if I broke it up into about three posts. There is one more key difference. I was able to work with an editor who helped me to focus the piece while allowing me to retain my "voice." My prose was probably a bit too breezy, but she embraced it and made it better. Trouble is that editors need to be paid and one might argue that authors do too! While this and other quality control mechanisms are not exclusive features of the old-world publishing model, they are certainly a large part of the service that authors and readers enjoy from them. They also serve as curators of the pieces that they publish. And this means that a good editor can exert a meta-level quality control that adds value to the readership. There's also a role for blogging as otherwise I wouldn't be writing this too. My postmodern view of the so-called traditional publishing venues is that they remain valuable even if we aren't sure how to monetize it as readily as we once did.

My C&EN Comment focused on Mentoring and the key role if fills in advancing young scientists into their careers. Most new faculty learn the job on the job. As the demands and the tenure decision pressure have grown, it is nearly impossible to figure out the job without help. This is where mentoring can play a big role.  The New Faculty Workshop is one attempt to institutionalize mentoring across all of the chemistry research- active departments. I wrote about my experience at last year's New Faculty Workshop in two earlier posts on July 6 and July 16. The next workshop being held on July 31-August 2, and I'm looking forward to meeting the newest cohort of young faculty.

Check out my my March 24th Comment in C&EN on “Mentoring New Faculty—It Really Works!” and John Schwab’s letter to the editor on May 19th reiterating the “Importance of Mentoring” in response to my Comment.

Spot the Chemist in Atlanta (#SERMACS2013 #SERMACS @ACSNtlMtg)

The Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (SERMACS 2013) started last night and runs through the rest of the week here in Atlanta. The Georgia Local Section is hosting it, and my colleagues are doing a great job staging it at the Loews Hotel. The last SERMACS held in Atlanta in 2003 broke records for regional attendance. It also left our section with a reserve that has enabled us to initiate and continue several new member and outreach programs in the Atlanta area. The official attendance of SERMACS2013 will likely be between 1500 and 2000 chemists, though there may be many more unregistered attendees. This means that there will be a lot of chemists walking along Peachtree Street in midtown Atlanta over the next few days. (Yes, this is the one *true* Peachtree Street not to be confused with the thousands of other Atlanta roads bearing the name Peachtree in on form or another.)

So this begs the question as to whether a given person walking along Peachtree Street this weekend is a Chemist or not. It's easy when you know them by name or from seeing their picture as you have trolled chemistry departments on the web. It's also cheating if you spot their SERMACS name tag or schwag. It used to be easy to spot us because we formerly wore pocket protectors, carried periodic tables, and occasionally wore our stylish prescription goggles outside the lab. These days, however, it's nearly impossible to play "Spot the Chemist" because we are increasingly representative of the national population. So I challenge you to play Spot the Chemist on Peachtree Street this week without cheating. My guess is that you will be far from batting 500...

Vote in the @AmerChemSociety #DistrictIV Director Election (#hernandez4acs)

Just in case you missed the direct mailings to the roughly 25,000 members of District IV of the American Chemical Society (ACS), here's an amalgam of my messages to them…

- - - - - - -
Dear colleague,

I'm writing to ask for your vote in the election for Director representing District IV on the Board of the American Chemical Society. As I don't want to flood your mailbox, I'm keeping this brief (and green.)

If you are like roughly 85% of the ACS membership, then you likely won't vote in this year's election. Every vote counts, though, as just last year, the District V election was settled by 5 votes (out of a total of 3389 votes). So please vote!

For more information about my activities and objectives go to http://tinyurl.com/hernandez4acs
Follow me on twitter at EveryWhereChem
Read my blog posts at EveryWhereChemistry on Blogspot.com.
E-mail me at hernandez.gatech@gmail.com
View my candidate statement at C&EN or at the ACS Election Web Site.

If you selected e-voting, then you may find your ballot instructions by searching your e-mail inbox for a message containing “vres.us”. Otherwise, you should have received a paper ballot. Either way, I encourage you to vote for your next ACS President and the District IV Director by the November 15th close of the election.

We all want a better world. Chemistry needs to be part of the solution.
It would be an honor to represent you in helping to advance our world through chemistry.

With kind regards,
Rigoberto Hernandez

Alan Alda and communication... Passion and the human element (#ACSIndy @ACSNatlMtg)

On the Monday of this month's ACS meeting, the ACS Board of Directors filled their open meeting with a special guest, Alan Alda. The one-hour lunch meeting typically includes time for members in the Presidential succession to make remarks that might be of interest to the attendees. It's meant to provide a forum for communication between ACS members and the Board. A few years ago, the Board noticed that the open board meeting was drawing too small an audience. They started to offer free lunches and a set of discussion topics with relevance to member needs. This has worked well in that the very large room typically fills, leaving many standing. At Indianapolis, the Board may have done this a bit too well. The featured speaker, Alan Alda, drew something like 700-1000 people. He also had enough material to fill the entire hour. The Board showed admirable flexibility in giving up their platform so as to focus on Alda's message, the importance of communication between scientists and the public.

Alan Alda has some real weight on the issue of science communication well beyond the fact that he played a very smart doctor on M*A*S*H. He founded the Alan Alda Center for Science Communication and has been promoting the Flame Challenge project challenging us all to explain science to an 11-year old. Alda tried to convince the audience of one key point: scientists tend to describe their science in such sterile terms that average people (and also our students) find little to relate to. In his dead-pan style he might have said that one point was about as much as we might remember after his presentation, but he needed an hour to have us remember even that. He encouraged us to connect our science to the human condition and relate it to the public. The latter may not understand how the Schrödinger Equation reveals how one can obtain the relative location of atoms by measuring the signals from nuclear spins, but they can relate to the fact that an MRI gives them information to identify and possibly cure a disease. As scientists, it's our job to advance science, but he reminded us that it's also our job to translate it to society. He warned us, though, that we should not be too dry in our delivery when speaking to the public. This convinced me that I should try to exhibit a bit more passion for my work in my next public talk...