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. 

May the ducks quack for you (A Tip for Conference Organizers)

Every two years since 2001, I have been co-organizing a workshop in Telluride on “Chemical Dynamics in Complex Environments” (Chem-DiCE). It's a great venue that attracts scientists (and their families) to attend and return. In our particular workshop, we focus on challenges to address molecular behavior (such as reactions) occurring in solvents that are heterogeneous and far from equilibrium. It turns out that this problem is common to many different chemical phenomenon. We therefore invite researchers that are are facing this challenge in different milieu, such as colloidal dispersions, renewable energy generation, proteins, and confined liquids.  We also aim to split the participants equally across theory/computing and experiment. For many of our participants, this meeting is the only time they see each other, let alone be exposed deeply to the research in their respective fields. The net effect is that our workshop gives rise to a cross-pollination of ideas and solutions across broad areas of research. I'd like to think that this is the main reason for the success of our workshop.

However, perhaps the real reason for our success is the organization structure:  Everyone who speaks gets an hour. That is, exactly an hour. At that point the ducks quack (on our timer), and the speaker is finished. It’s not uncommon for speakers to go through only one-quarter to one-third of the material they prepared. That’s because the audience is so interactive that many questions come to the surface, allowing us all to probe the material that is covered much more deeply. It also allows for consideration of questions or issues that someone from outside of a field might naively ask but which, in running counter to the established dogma, requires a profound new direction or solution to address. No speaker ever gets to the end, and they are invariably unhappy that they were unable to do so. But everyone is happy that all the other speakers are stopped at exactly an hour. In the eight workshops that we have run so far, only once was someone allowed to speak beyond that hour. In that case, the speaker wanted to answer a question that had been raised as the ducks were quacking. He pleaded to continue, and I concurred only after the entire group voted unanimously in favor. Thus the structure of talks is very egalitarian, and provides an opportunity for all to learn something new. That’s why I think that my colleagues keep coming back!

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...

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...

ACS National Meetings… Large is the new small... @AmerChemSociety @ACSNatlMtg #ACSIndy

In my previous post, I implied that the reason for going to ACS meetings is that they are so very large. Trouble is that such size is precisely the reason why many chemists avoid them and advise others to do likewise. So here's my advice on how you can eat your cake and have it too at national meetings (and this isn't restricted to ACS meetings!)...

First and foremost, you have to make choices about where you need to be when. You should just give up, without regret, on those things you just can't do or fail to reach because you stopped for something else along the way. As a beginning graduate student, I would focus only on the technical session closest to my research area, but later I started to hop between sessions to get a better sense of the field. In either case, I was completely oblivious to the rest of the meeting, thereby keeping it manageable. I know of other chemists at that early stage in their careers, who made completely different and equally satisfying choices. For example, they may have jumped in nearly exclusively into the career development training sessions or into the chemical education offerings. Others used their time at the national meeting to jump into technical or professional sessions outside of their core doctoral research area. Regardless, we never failed to present our posters or talks so as to share our work and hear feedback from others.

As a working professional, I now distribute all of these strategies into my meeting days, adding governance and outreach activities too. But my overall algorithm is essentially the same. I look at the meeting as a physical realization of the web. There's no way that I can visit every site. Instead, I surf sites to learn, teach and share chemistry with others. The difference is that at the ACS meeting, I can actually see and interact face-to-face with people. Which is to say that I act as if I'm attending a small meeting filled with all the people that I want to see. Indeed, being at the national ACS meeting with so very many people insures that the cross-cut I see is invariably filled with the ones I was looking for! I do miss some, though, and that's why I come back for the next one.

post ACS recovery... @AmerChemSociety @ACSNatlMtg #ACSIndy

Yogi Berra apparently said, “Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." He wasn't speaking of ACS meetings, but rather of a St. Louis haunt, Ruggieri's restaurant. There's no doubt, though, that ACS meetings are big. Indeed the American Chemical Society (ACS) holds two national meetings a year, and each includes on the order of 15,000 people. There are many technical sessions running in parallel, governance meetings, outreach events, receptions, and the list goes on. Thanks to pre-registration and the postal mail, at least we can avoid the infamous long lines of days of old at the front end of the meeting. Sadly, many chemists choose not to attend simply because they follow Yogi's advice. So why do I keep going, and more importantly why should you attend an ACS meeting? I suppose that I like the menu! It's huge, and I invariably stumble over unexpected chemistry or old friends. And you can too.

The only down side is that, like me, you may find yourself so busy that you never to stop for a break. While I managed to blog some posts during the recent meeting in Indianapolis, the needed recovery led to my not-so-brief lapse in posting during the past week or so. I had papers to write and submit, papers to review, students to advise, classes to teach, assignments to grade, deliverables to submit, e-mails to write, and many other items on my to-do list. And that's ignoring all the other items on the other side of the work-life balance sheet. I'm sure you're no different. Nevertheless, I find our National meetings as useful to my work, if not more so, than some smaller specialized meetings. I could do a lot worse than needing some recovery time after being supersaturated with chemistry for a week…

Why I'm running for ACS District IV Director (#hernandez4acs #district4acs @AmerChemSociety #ACSindy)

Today, my campaign remarks are being recorded just prior to the start of the ACS National Meeting in Indianapolis. I'm not quite sure how the video will be used during the meeting, on the ACS campaign website, or anywhere else. A draft of the transcript that I'll be reading is included below. I'll be a talking head with no audience participation so it won't be too exciting! Feel free to send me suggestions, though, as I've got until about 3:00PM EDT today to change it.

"The American Chemical Society is our fellowship. It provides both physical and virtual meeting places for networking with like-minded chemists. ACS has brilliantly recognized that the meaning of like-minded is both very diverse and evolving. It includes many different flavors of chemistry such as molecule making, measuring, and simulating; it ranges through the fundamental sciences, engineering, and manufacturing. ACS also recognizes that chemistry has a human side and it must be diverse. The challenge lies in continuing to adapt our structure to best serve the needs of our fellowship.

I see three areas of which we must be ever mindful: (1) The value proposition of ACS membership, (2) Education of the chemical workforce, and (3) Science advocacy. The diversity in age, experience, backgrounds, geography, citizenship, race, ethnicity, gender, orientation, and abilities that makes our fellowship stronger must be addressed through everything we do. My championing of diversity equity on task forces, on boards, and as the OXIDE director demonstrates my strong commitment to advancing these critical issues within the chemical workforce.

As members of the ACS, we also have a responsibility to give back to our profession and our world. Chemical tools, chemical analytics and chemical products will solve the challenges that confront our world. But it's the job of the ACS Board to make sure that congress and others make the investments to ensure that we are around to innovate. Given my past work in science advocacy, including serving on the National Academy's Board on Chemical Sciences, I believe that I have the experience to advocate effectively on your behalf as the District IV Director.

We are ONE ACS, but each of us is also an individual chemist with particular interests and needs.
The role of the ACS is to facilitate our interactions, enhance content dissemination, advocate for the chemical sciences, and support anything that advances chemistry. 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 so that I may work with you and our fellow members to advance your ACS."

Doing chemistry on a gondola!? (Parting thoughts on #TellurideSciencestyle)

Practically every TSRC Workshop lecture starts with some quip about how the landscapes of the terrain inspires us to think about our science. In my case, the landscapes are reminiscent of the potential energy surface that governs a chemical reaction. Molecules, like people, look for the shortest path traversing the lowest point on the ridge between the reactant valley and the product valley. Sometimes, the path isn't traversable because there is still snow along it or some other obstacle blocks the way. Or maybe there's something along the path that can accelerate the journey (such as the gondola giving you a lift and sidestepping 1000 feet or so of the vertical rise). Both of these events also occur in chemistry (or biochemistry). You can have steric clashes with other parts of the reacting molecule or the solvent which slows the reaction down, and you can have catalysts (or enzymes) or solvent fluctuations that speed it up. 

More specifically, one of the current debates in chemical reaction rate theory concerns whether transition state theory is sufficiently accurate (or at least, correctable) to make it useful for quantitative description. This debate maps directly to the question of how to compute the rate of crossing from one  valley to another across a torturous mountain range. The mountaineers will likely spend a lot of time discussing whether there is a single col (and which one) affords the best passage. Similarly, chemists debate whether there is a single "transition state" which describes the reaction. Some, including me, argue that accessibility to the transitions state (or col) and the ease to move through it is equally important. That is, it's not just a single point which determines the passage, but also the shape of the surface around it. The debate doesn't stop here because we can start to kibitz about whether or not there exists a second (or more) transition state that is important to describe the passage between the valleys (of the reactants and products). Or perhaps there exist a gondola which takes you over them even faster? While this latter event doesn't actually occur in the chemical context unless you add additional (shuttling) molecules to the system, the analogies between Telluride's landscapes and the energy landscapes over which chemistry takes place are clearly richer than they may appear at first sight. Thus, while this is my last post on Telluride until my next trip there, it will most certainly continue to inspire me.

Is Telluride on top of the world of science?

This week, I'm hanging out in Telluride at a workshop focusing on dynamics and kinetics in many dimensions. This is relevant to molecular reactions, protein folding and diffusion, metals and much more. It's brought together an eclectic set of chemical physicists, biophysicists, mathematicians and others from several countries around the world. But who would have thought that I would also run into specialists—and friends—in electronic structure or polymer physics who are attending other workshops? Evidently we're all attracted to the beautiful terrain of this box canyon at 8750 feet above sea level AND to the science we learn from each other in the small workshop format afforded by the TSRC.

In just the five workshops that are being run at the Telluride Science Research Center (TSRC) this week, there are several members of the National Academy, many more who have received national and international awards, and truly many of the leading scientists in their respective fields. After these workshops end, there will be another five workshops next week with another set of similarly highly esteemed researchers. This will continue to repeat weekly through early August. In all, well over 1000 scientists from around the world will have convened in Telluride by the end of the year. That's much more than you can find at any major university in the same span. All you need to do to run across nearly all the major researchers in the chemical sciences is spend your summer sitting at the main coffee bar in town! If all works according to plan, there will even be a permanent facility built for the TSRC by 2017. With that, there should be little doubt that the TSRC is the place to be to if you want to see the cutting edge of science and the landscape beyond it.