Hello Fellow Chemists,
Welcome to March Madness. Just like the basketball tournaments, March is a very busy month for the ACS and the Silicon Valley section. The big event of the month is of course the ACS Spring National meeting in San Diego. But closer to home, our local ACS section has an exciting series of activities lined up. This includes the annual Mosher Award ceremony held on March 3. Professor Resa Kelly gave an intriguing presentation on her SJSU research which explored the use of animated simulations of reactions to illustrate the not-so-simple reaction of NaOH and HCl. If you missed this presentation, you can see the neutralization animation as well as other animations on Dr. Kelly’s YouTube channel.
Continuing in March, we have the Synopsys Championship Science Fair on March 10. Our section provides judges and presents awards to outstanding chemistry projects at the senior high and junior high school levels. Our newest SVACS awards, the David Parker Science Fair Awards, recognize promising middle school students. I am constantly amazed by the knowledge and excitement our students bring to the science fair. It certainly puts the projects I recall doing to shame!
San Jose State University hosts the Science Palooza STEM fair on May 14. Judges are needed, so please reach out to the contacts on the Science Palooza website if you would like to see what our younger generation can do and encourage them to do more!
We have resumed some of our annual in-person chemistry outreach activity. For Chemists Celebrate Earth Week we will host an event at the Redwood City Library on March 12. Also on March 12 we are joining a new organization’s first STEM event, the Pacific Islanders Encouraging Fun Engineering Science & Technology Festival. Again volunteers are needed and very welcome to come help enhance our younger generation’s involvement in chemistry and science.
Lastly, the Chemistry Olympiad activity is starting. During March, students from 17 local high schools take the initial qualifying exam. We then nominate our section’s 13 top-scoring students to progress to the National Exam. This year, we will once again offer students the experience of the in-person laboratory practical exam.
As is described elsewhere in the newsletter, we are hosting another evening seminar in March, on the Water Quality and Contaminant Fate Following Natural Disasters by Profs. Webster and Whelton. They will present their work on the impact of the fires that have devastated California in recent years. While this seminar will be held as a Zoom teleconference, we are working to bring our meetings to at least a hybrid format for future events.
