Professor Xue Received Service Award

December 13, 2017 by chemweb

UT employees with at least 25 years of service were recognized at the university’s fall Service Awards Luncheon on Wednesday, Dec. 13. Chemistry professor Ben Xue was honored for their continued contributions and loyalty to the University of Tennessee.

The event, hosted by UT System President Joe DiPietro and coordinated by the Office of the President and UT Human Resources, honored employees from UT Knoxville, the UT Institute of Agriculture, the UT System administration, and the UT Foundation. The Service Awards Luncheon is held in the spring and fall to recognize employees with service milestones of 25 or more years.

Zi-Ling (Ben) Xue studied physical chemistry-catalysis at Nanjing University–Nanjing College of Pharmacy, and received his B.S. degree in 1982.  He was selected in 1983 as a Chemistry Graduate Program (CGP or William von E. Doering Program) fellow, and entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1984, studying organometallic chemistry with Herbert D. Kaesz.  After receiving his Ph.D. degree in 1989, he moved to Indiana University in 1990 as a postdoctoral fellow with Kenneth G. Caulton and Malcolm H. Chisholm. In 1992, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee.  He is now a Paul and Wilma Ziegler Professor of Chemistry.  He served in 1999-2001 as a member of the Executive Committee, ACS Division of Inorganic Chemistry, and was the division Membership Chair in 2007-2015.  Professor Xue is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and American Chemical Society (ACS). Professor Xue has received several awards including a National Science Foundation (NSF) Young Investigator Award and a NSF Special Creativity Award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, DuPont Young Professor Award, Changjiang Lecture Professor, Distinguished Oversea Young Scholar Award (Chinese Natural Science Foundation), and UK Royal Society Kan Tong Po Visiting Professorship.  He was an Associate Editor, Science China Chemistry, in 2010-2017.

Voices and ideas: An ethical chemist

October 24, 2017 by chemweb

By Grant Currin

First published on The Key Reporter Phi Beta Kappa’s Publication for News and Alumni Relations

Questions of scientific ethics were anything but hypothetical during the 1950s and ‘60s, when chemists were developing napalm and physicists were perfecting the weapons their countries would use if the Cold War turned hot.

Jeffrey Kovac was a teenager at the time.

“My interest [in scientific ethics] came from the fear of nuclear war during my childhood and me wondering about the ethical questions that the scientists who developed the bomb might have had,” he said.

Kovac graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in 1970. In 1976, after earning a PhD in chemistry from Yale University and completing a post-doc at MIT, Kovac accepted a position at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where he is still a member of the faculty.

During the first decades of his career, Kovac pursued a conventional research agenda and taught courses in general, physical, and polymer chemistry. His research focus began to shift in the late 1980s after he developed a new course for undergraduates.

“I was teaching the capstone course in chemistry that was supposed to look at the field from a broader perspective,” he said. “There were stories of scientific misconduct in the press, so I decided to introduce ethics into the course.”

Kovac collected those stories and adapted them for classroom use. After thinking and writing further on professional and scientific ethics, he incorporated dozens of those moral problems into The Ethical Chemist, a textbook described in its preface as “a self-contained introduction to professional ethics for both chemistry students and practicing chemists.”

Since first publishing The Ethical Chemist in 1993, Kovac has focused his energy on researching and writing about scientific ethics from philosophical and historical perspectives. Though he still teaches chemistry courses, Kovac’s research has moved from the sciences to the humanities. He now writes on ethics, history, and pedagogy, mostly for scientific audiences and advocates for ethics education.

After two decades of teaching and writing in his new fields, Kovac has been recognized by the international scientific community. In 2016, the Swiss Academy of Sciences invited him to deliver a number of lectures inaugurating the organization’s series on ethics, and earlier this year Kovac participated in a panel on scientific ethics at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting.

Kovac explained the wide range of his scholarly interests by pointing back to the first years of his academic life.

“My transition from full time research in chemistry to scholarship in the humanities is the result of the liberal arts education that I received at Reed College where I was able to study history and philosophy in depth in parallel with chemistry, physics and mathematics,” he explained.

“At Reed the disciplinary boundaries were quite fluid and there was lively dialogue between students and faculty in different fields, so I learned to think broadly, which is one of the ideals of Phi Beta Kappa.”

Kovac has demonstrated his commitment to Phi Beta Kappa’s mission in other aspects of his professional life. He leads College Scholars, the University of Tennessee’s interdisciplinary honors program, and has held a number of positions in Phi Beta Kappa, first as president of the University of Tennessee chapter (1989-1990 and 1999-2016) and now as a member at large of the Phi Beta Kappa senate and as a member of the selection committee for the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science.

Note: A revised edition of The Ethical Chemist will be published by Oxford University Press in the near future.

Grant Currin (ΦBK, University of Tennessee, 2017) currently lives in Mallorca, Spain, where he works as a part-time English teacher. The University of Tennessee is home to the Epsilon of Tennessee Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

(Posted on 10/25/2017 )

Professor Musfeldt Named 2017 APS Fellow

October 14, 2017 by chemweb

Janice Musfeldt, Ziegler Professor of Chemistry, was elected to the 2017 class of American Physical Society (APS) Fellows. The APS Fellowship is a distinct honor signifying recognition by one’s professional peers.

Musfeldt was nominated by APS Division of Materials Physics for her “contributions to the spectroscopy of quantum materials with an emphasis on high magnetic field effects in multiferroics, quantum magnets, and nanomaterials.”

The APS Fellowship Program recognizes members who have made exceptional contributions to the physics enterprise, including outstanding physics research, important applications of physics, leadership in or service to physics, or significant contributions to physics education. Each year, no more than one half of one percent of the Society’s membership is elected to the status of Fellow.

Musfeldt obtained her B.S. in chemical engineering from University of Illinois in 1984 and completed her Ph.D. study in physical chemistry at University of Florida in 1992.  She worked as a post doctoral research associate at the Departement de Physique, Universite de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada from 1993 to 1994, and joined the faculty at the Department of Chemistry, State University of New York at Binghamton prior to coming to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2001.

Musfeldt has received multiple awards and recognitions throughout her career, including 1996 NSF CAREER Award, 2001 NSF Creativity Award, 2010 UT Chancellor’s Award for Research and Creative Achievement, and 2010 – 2014 and 2015 – 2019 Ziegler Professorship.

Musfeldt’s Group’s research focuses on studying the behavior of materials under extreme conditions. The group is well known for their spectroscopic work in high magnetic fields and pressures, under unusual chemical and photochemical activation, and at very small sizes where quantum confinement becomes apparent. Recently, the group along with other collaborators received $1.6 Million NSF-DMREF Award for Advanced Materials Research.

Two Graduate Students Received Shull Wollan Center Graduate Research Fellowship

September 11, 2017 by chemweb

Two Graduate Students Received Shull Wollan Center Graduate Research Fellowship

Shelby Stavretis, a 4th year graduate student in Dr. Ben Xue’s research group, and Fatema Wahida, a 3rd year graduate student in Dr. John Larese’s research group, were awarded Shull Wollan Center Graduate Research Fellowship for May 2017 through April 2018. The Fellowship includes a year of stipend in support of  the awardees’ research.

In 1998 Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee (UT) established the Joint Institute for Neutron Sciences, which had been reconstituted as the Shull Wollan Center: a Joint Institute for Neutron Science.

“(Clifford) Shull and (Ernest) Wollan were pioneering researchers of neutron diffraction in the 1940s, laying the groundwork for scientific breakthroughs that continue to this day in physics, energy science, materials science, and biological science,” stated on UT’s Office of Research & Engagement website.

“Dr. Xue forwarded an email announcement for the fellowship,” Stavretis said. “When I was notified I received the award I felt excited that my research in neutron scattering was being recognized. This fellowship will provide invaluable support for my neutron scattering research projects. It will help advance my research goals and provides opportunities for further collaboration with the scientists at the Spallation Neutron Source.”

Stavretis completed her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Butler University. In 2014, she joined Xue’s inorganic chemistry research group. Since then her work has focused on using neutron scattering techniques to probe molecular magnetism. Her research relies on the user facilities at the Spallation Neutron Source and the the NIST Center for Neutron Research at ORNL.

“I was very excited and pleased to receive this award.” Wahida said. “A great deal of my research requires neutron scattering to gain insight into the dynamics of the molecular systems under study. This fellowship is a great inspiration and recognition of my work. I believe it will help me contribute to neutron science by accomplishing my graduate school research goals. I sincerely thank the committee for selecting me as a recipient. I am also thankful to my advisor Professor J. Z. Larese for his endless support and guidance in my research.”

Wahida completed her undergraduate in Applied Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Dhaka. She joined Larese materials and neutron scattering group in fall 2014. Her current research focuses on studying the thermodynamics and molecular dynamics of the adsorption of cyclic hydrocarbons on surfaces with comparable symmetries. Neutron scattering is used in her research to probe the microscopic dynamics and the structure of the adsorbed molecular films. Most of the neutron experiments are conducted at the user facilities of the Spallation Neutron Source (SNS) at ORNL.

Graduate Student Attended National School on X-Ray and Neutron Scattering

September 11, 2017 by chemweb

Zhiming Liu, a second year graduate student in Dr. Ben Xue’s Research Group, attended the 19^th National School on X-Ray and Neutron Scattering from August 5^th to 19^th held at Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The School aims to “educate graduate students on the utilization of major neutron and x-ray facilities.” The two-week program included lectures, presented by researchers from academia, industry, and national laboratories, and provided basic tutorials on the principles of scattering theory and the characteristics of the sources, as well as seminars on the application of scattering methods to a variety of scientific subjects.

“It was a very precious opportunity to learn first-hand experiments from the top scientists in each field.” Liu said. “Form the experiments, we had chance to work on 3 different instruments at both Argonne and ORNL. We spent every afternoon with different beamline scientists. They were very nice and patient. They answered our questions in depth and extended our knowledge further from different point of views.” Liu continued. “These really help me to know what kind science these state-of-art techniques can probe and how these can fit to my own research.”

Liu was born and grew up in Weihai, Shandong Province, northeast coast of China. He obtained his B.S. in Applied Chemistry from Jiangnan University in 2016, and came to UT the same year to start to work towards a Ph.D. degree in chemistry. He is currently working on probing molecular magnetism by neutron scattering.

“I want to thank ORNL and Argonne National Lab for offering this great opportunity to boost my knowledge and field of vision.” Liu expressed his gratitude towards mentors who have helped him along the way. “Thank you Dr. Ziling Xue and Shelby Stavretis for the help with my application. And the thank you Dr. Sheng Dai and Dr. Zhiguo Gu for the recommendation.”

Strong Hall Impacts Chemistry Education

September 8, 2017 by chemweb

The newly completed Strong Hall is a 268,000-square-foot academic science structure that houses Anthropology and Earth & Planetary Sciences departments, General Biology and Chemistry teaching labs, as well as state-of-the-art teaching spaces and lecture halls.

Construction at Strong Hall started in Spring 2014 and finished in Summer 2017. A dedication ceremony was held on Friday, September 8th.  The building maintained historic details from the 1926 Sophronia Strong Residence Hall and included a total restoration of the 19th-Century Queen Ann Style Cowan Cottage at the corner of the site.

Faculty and staff at the Department of Chemistry are quite excited about the impacts of this new building and the 14,000-square-foot new lab space could bring to chemistry education.

“I think that the new building enhances the student and faculty experience at UT.  The building looks great and has tons of natural light.” David Jenkins, Associate Professor of Chemistry, said. “All of the labs have much more space per student and are designed with technology in mind. In particular, the organic labs are excellent with a top-notch facility for instruction. Having an NMR in every lab is fantastic.”

Bhavya Sharma, Assistant Professor of Chemistry agrees. “I think the new labs are amazing. They’ve got so many new features. The set-up lets an instructor put instructions up on a screen instead of having to write them out on a board. They have new instruments, and the new design of the lab spaces let the Teaching Assistants be able to see all of the students at one time. It’s really exciting.”

Sharma is particularly interested in seeing how this could impact recruitment. “I taught the Governor’s Schools for Science and Engineering in Chemistry at Strong Hall this summer. They were high school students who had never had a college level chemistry class. They were impressed with the facilities at UT, so hopefully that will encourage them to come here in the future.”