ALUMNI & FRIENDS NEWSLETTER Summer 2014 TABLE OF CONTENTS INSIDE 3 Letter from the Chair 4 Faculty News 4 Team Develops Chemical Solution Storyideas,activitiesandachievementscanbesubmittedby for Graphene Challenges [email protected] guaranteepublicationandtheeditorreservestherighttoeditfor 5 Grant Funds New Approach to HIV Vaccine space,clarity,grammarandstyle. 6 Startup Grown From UNL Research Editor and Writer Wins NSF Grant KerryEVondrak 7 Zeng Named Royal Society Contributing Writers of Chemistry Fellow TroyFedderson,DeannGayman,TomSimonsandVickiMiller 8 Faculty Accomplishments Contributing Photographers CraigChandler,TroyFeddersonandGregNathanofUNL 9 Faculty Publications and Patents CommunicationsandKevinSwan,SwanShot.com Designer 10 Happenings StephanieSeverin 10 Mass Spectrometry at UNL has a Editorial Correspondence email Rich and Long Heritage [email protected] 13 Avery Hall’s Time Capsule Removed orwriteKerryEVondrak UniversityofNebraska–Lincoln 14 Faculty Retreat 515AHamiltonHall Lincoln,NE68588-0304 14 Dr. Lloyd Selected as National Phone:402.472.4453 Historic Chemical Landmark Updates 15 Student News Alumnimembers,nowyoucanupdateyourcontact informationbyvisitinghttp://chemweb.unl.edu/ 15 Ivan Moreno: Recipient of NSF Fellowship registrationforms/?wpgform_qv=alumni-registration. 15 Student Awards and Scholarships 17 Congratulations to our Graduates Support the Chemistry Department 18 Staff News Ifyouwouldlikemoreinformationaboutspecificneedsofthe 18 Ovation and Applause Honors department,suchasgraduateandundergraduatefellowships/ scholarships,awardlectureships,orresearchinstrumentation, pleasecontact: 19 Introducing 19 Joseph S. Francisco to lead Director of Development College of Arts and Sciences AmberAntholz (402)458.1182direct 19 Beth Donovan and Stephen Morin (800)432.3216tollfree [email protected] 21 Alumni News 21 John Schiel 23 In Memory 23 Gordon A. Gallup; Robert S Marianelli; William Patrick Henry; Dexter B. Sharp 24 Recruitment and Remembrance Fund ItisthepolicyoftheUniversityofNebraska–Lincolnnottodiscriminatebased uponage,race,ethnicity,color,nationalorigin,gender-identity,sex,pregnancy, 25 Reconnect disability,sexualorientation,geneticinformation,veteran’sstatus,maritalstatus, religionorpoliticalaffiliation.©2014,TheBoardofRegentsoftheUniversityof Nebraska.Allrightsreserved.1406.041 2 INTRODUCTION Letter from the Chair Fellow Nebraska Chemists, Greetings from Lincoln! Let me begin by thanking Jim Takacs for doing an outstanding job as Chair and for adroitly passing the baton to me last August. Much has happened this past year. Our newest faculty member, Steve Morin, joined UNL Chemistry fresh out of a postdoc in Presidential Medal of Science Winner, George Whitesides’ laboratory at Harvard in Fall 2013. I think that Steve set a record by recruiting four new graduate students in his first year! Steve has interests in soft robotics, microfluidics and elastomeric polymers. His group is pumped as they just moved into custom-designed space on the 4th floor of Hamilton Hall. Elizabeth S. “Beth” Donovan arrived in January 2014 as the new Assistant Director of Instrumentation in the Department, with primary responsibility for the UIC. Beth came to us from her postdoc at Sandia National Labs. Beth works closely with Martha Morton, Director of the Research Instrumentation Facility (RIF). Big news there: The new Bruker 700 MHz liquids NMR is up and running, and according to Martha, already a favorite with the graduate students. We are working on a new magnet for the 600 MHz solids NMR and on an SEM for the UIC—more on those instruments later—stay tuned. Joe Francisco just took the helm as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UNL on July 1, 2014, arriving from Purdue. Joe will also hold a 0.2 FTE in the Department of Chemistry as the Cordes Chair. As many of you know, Joe is both an outstanding scientist, with interests in computational and atmospheric chemistry, and a leader in the community, having served as President of the ACS and of NOBCChe. Joe was recently inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and we are tickled pink (well red, actually) to call him one of our own. With the Francisco hire, we are establishing the NC3 (Nebraska Cluster for Computational Chemistry)—more soon!! Research successes abound in the Department: The groups of Jiantao Guo/Wei Niu; David Hage and Liangcheng Du/Pat Dussault all recently landed significant new NIH grants and Andrzej Rajca, Marjorie Langell, Marilyne Stains and Barry Cheung all recently received new grants from the NSF. Cliff Stains and Jian Zhang were funded from the Michael J. Fox Foundation and ACS PRF, respectively! Mark Griep directs a new NSF- funded outreach project to improve science education in Native American communities in Nebraska. Honors have also been conferred upon our faculty. Xiao Zeng was named a Fellow of the RSC. Pat Dussault was awarded the College of Arts and Sciences ORCA award. Rebecca Lai has been awarded the Susan Rosowski Chair, for highly meritorious Associate Professors, and Alex Sinitskii received the Edgerton junior faculty award, and I was just elected as Chair of the Biocatalysis Gordon Research Conference. There is so much more to discuss, but alas, you can read about some of it here and discuss the rest in person. Please come to our annual Nebraska Chemistry Alumni Gathering at the Fall 2014 ACS Meeting in San Francisco—5:15 p.m. on Tuesday, August 12, 2014, at The Thirsty Bear!—Be there or be square (planar). Also keep a bookmark in your calendars for Spring 2016; our next Nebraska Chemistry Reunion is due to happen then; likely timed with the Spring Game. And, by the way, if you have not been back recently, you absolutely must head back for a visit. You will not believe the construction/development in this city; the Railyard in the West Haymarket is simply hopping—with new restaurants, hotels and entertainment at the international level (Elton John, Paul McCartney, the Eagles, Jay-Z, etc have all come through this year). And, of course, the real “rock stars” are the faculty whom we have been hiring. Hope to see you soon in Lincoln or at the Fall ACS Meeting in San Francisco! Best wishes, David B. Berkowitz Willa Cather Professor & Department Chair 3 FACULT Y NEWS Chemistry Research Team Develops Chemical Solution for Graphene Challenges There’s no question that graphene is a really cool material. It’s the While those processes work well in the semiconductor industry, thinnest substance ever made, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon where silicon transistor features as small as 22 nanometers (22 atoms arranged in a hexagonal honeycomb pattern. Although it’s billionths of a meter) are carved from large silicon crystals, they don’t as stiff as diamond and hundreds of times stronger than steel, it’s work with graphene nanoribbons, which need to be as narrow as 2 flexible and stretchable. On top of that, it conducts electricity faster nanometers, Sinitskii said. at room temperature than any other known material and it can convert light of any wavelength into a current. Consequently, he and his collaborators tried a different, ultimately successful approach that they described in the Feb. 10 issue of Finding a way to make use of those properties has proven to be an Nature Communications, the online multidisciplinary journal of the enormous challenge, however. Graphene’s extreme thinness makes Nature Publishing Group. it complicated and expensive to produce in large sheets, especially large sheets with a minimum of flaws. In addition, no one has “Instead of starting with a large sheet of graphene and trying to cut devised effective industrial methods for handling a material so thin. it down to something small—the essence of a top-down approach— we decided to use a bottom-up approach, making small graphene Beyond that, one of graphene’s greatest strengths—its extreme nanoribbons by coupling even smaller organic molecules,” Sinitskii said. conductivity—is also one of its greatest weaknesses. Once electrical current starts flowing through graphene, it’s very hard to turn it “When you develop a method for making graphene nanoribbons, on and off, a vital requirement in digital electronics. According to there are two problems that you need to solve: how to fabricate very theoretical studies, it is possible to turn the conductivity of graphene narrow ribbons with atomic precision and how to fabricate them in on and off if it is constrained into a narrow channel, a graphene large quantities. The method that we developed solves both these nanoribbon. However, the practical realization of these nanoribbons is problems. The whole process is done by wet chemistry in a flask, challenging because of their extremely small size—their width is about and, it can be easily scaled up. We can make a gram, a kilogram, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of an average human hair. essentially any amount of material that’s necessary.” Now, however, at least some of those challenges may have found an Producing nanoscale ribbons of graphene is an essential step in answer in recent research performed at UNL. putting the substance to work in all manner of electrical devices, Sinitskii said, because the ribbons have tunable electronic properties. A team of scientists led by Alexander Sinitskii has developed a chemical approach to mass producing graphene nanoribbons, a process that “We are testing these ribbons for applications in electronics, gas may provide an avenue to harnessing graphene’s conductivity.