Academic chemistry departments

Unfortunately, the tension between the computational chemists and the medicinal chemists at pharmaceutical companies did not ease in the 1970s. Medicinal chemists were at the top of the pecking order in corporate research laboratories. This was an industry-wide problem revealed in conversations at scientific meetings where computational chemists from industry (there were not many) could informally exchange their experiences and challenges. (Readers should not get the impression that the tension between theoreticians and experimentalists existed solely in the business world. It also existed in academic chemistry departments.)... 

As in any reexamination of the field, chemists and chemical engineers should ask serious questions about current practices. Does the divisional structure in academic chemistry departments discourage multi-investigator research, or encourage artificial distinctions Are the traditional divisions still the best structure... 

The status of chemists in the eyes of executives was boosted by the successes of chemists in fields such as plastics, petrochemicals, and synthetic textiles. The industry s growing demand for trained chemists forged a new relationship with many academic chemistry departments. For example, universities supplied industry with chemists and with basic research to supplement work done in industrial laboratories. In turn, industry provided financial support to chemistry departments. Many of the increasing number of chemistry students in American universities were supported by pre- and post- doctoral fellowships from chemical corporations (Thackray et al., 1985). 

Most academic chemistry departments some years ago addressed the problem of carcinogenic chemicals in the laboratory. Many have tried to eliminate the use of materials such as benzene and carbon tetrachloride, which have been linked to human cancer. But what about the chemicals that might cause birth defects ... 

Recognizing that external pressures are forcing academic Chemistry departments to abandon their traditional relaxed attitudes toward safety, we have attempted to construct the safest building possible with the available funds. This alone will not guarantee accident- and hazard-free operation, however. The faculty, administration and staff must support and encourage safe practices. In this spirit, the University in 1977 established a campus-wide safety committee to assist and advise departments and the various support services when questions on safety arise. 

CCR was incorporated about three years ago. Its board is elected and substructured into a series of committees, of which that dealing with the university-industry interface is perhaps the most significant for this presentation. It is currently developing Industry information stations in academic chemistry departments, a directory of industrial research laboratories and general topics of investigation, and a computer searchable file of research Interests of faculty in their first three years of academic life as a pilot project for possible later expansion to all faculty. 

The first of these could well be research chemists and students in an academic or industrial environment who need to know what modern techniques are available to assist them in their efforts, but otherwise feel they have little concern for the operation of a spectrometer. Their data is likely to be collected under fully automated conditions or provided by a central analytical facility. The second may be a chemist in an academic environment who has hands-on access to a spectrometer and has his or her own samples that demand specific studies that are perhaps not available from fully automated instrumentation. The third class of reader may work in a smaller chemical company or academic chemistry department who have invested in NMR instrumentation but may not employ a dedicated NMR spectroscopist for its upkeep, depending instead on, say, an analytical or synthetic chemist for this. This, it appears (in the UK at least), is often the case for new... 

There are few courses in academic chemistry departments that deal with drug discovery and development. Graduating students typically have scant exposure to the fascinating world of industrial chemistry. I am confident that the material will excite students interested in careers in the pharmaceutical industry. A salient feature of the book is the inclusion of several case studies that exemplify and epitomize the concepts detailed in each chapter. An instructor interested in developing a course in pharmaceutical chemistry will hnd the book useful as a teaching text for a one-semester course. 

In 1980 the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) wrote a regulation called the Hazard Communication Standard ( HazCom ) that required all chemical suppliers to provide MSDSs to chemical users. These MSDSs, described more below, provide an organized document that lists a wide variety of safety information about a chemical. For the past three decades, academic chemistry departments like yours and all other organizations that purchase and use chemicals have been required to have on hand, either in hard copy or electronic format, MSDSs so that employees have access to safety information about chemicals they would be using in their job. So, it is very likely that you will encounter MSDSs as a science smdent and a scientist and it is important to know how to read them intelligently. (More about this below.)... 

In the Prefaces of both the 4th and the 5th editions the senior author commented on the tendency of wet and dry surface chemistry for differentiation into separate schools. This remains the case today also, academic research in wet surface chemistry continues to move from chemistry departments to engineering ones. On the other hand, new connections between the two areas have been forming apace with the current prominence of scanning microscopies. 

At this time, the interdisciplinarity of the materials field is being emphasized as much as the topic itself. Materials chemistry will bring to the academic chemistry community an excellent opportunity to practice what they often preach (or agree with) regarding the importance of interdisciplinarity, as they incorporate more courses from the materials science and physics departments as part of their requirements. 

He maintained an active research program throughout his academic career up to the time of his death. During his 52 years in the Chemistry Department at Berkeley he provided research training for more than 200 graduate stu-... 

Academe. In academe, more interviewees at historically white colleges and universities cited difficulties associated with tenure, and promotion beyond the associate professor level. Indeed, many interviewees who took non-academic appointments expressed concern about pursuing an academic career because of the subjectivity of the tenure process and the lower salary levels relative to those in industry. Several chemists at research universities said that they were unable to recruit top graduate students in their department - even when they had funded projects. In fact, some interviewees claimed to have knowledge of well-trained chemists leaving academic chemistry out of fmstration because their research was stymied without students. These claims require further investigation. 

Frances Heaney was born in Northern Ireland she studied at Queen s University, Belfast, where she obtained a B.Sc. in 1986 and a Ph.D. in 1990 under the direction of Professor R. Grigg. After spending two years as a postdoctoral research fellow in the laboratories of Dr. Peter Boyle at Trinity College, Dublin, she took up her first academic position in the chemistry department at the National University of Ireland, Galway. In 1999, she took up her present position as chemistry lecturer at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. Her scientific interests include synthetic chemistry, heterocyclic chemistry, rearrangement reactions, reaction mechanisms, and organocatalysis. 

Nouria Al-Awadi was born in Kuwait and obtained her B.Sc. from the Faculty of Science at Kuwait University in 1976 and Ph.D. from the University of Kent, UK, in 1979. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sussex (1981-82). Prof. Al-Awadi is FRCS and chartered scientist of RSC. She has been professor of organic chemistry at the University of Kuwait since 1992. Prof Al-Awadi has held several administrative positions at Kuwait University Vice dean of the College of Graduate Studies at Kuwait University (1984—90) Head of the Chemistry Department (1992-95) dean of Faculty of Science (1995-2001) Prof. Al-Awadi since September 2006 until now is vice-president of Kuwait University for academic affairs. Prof. Al-Awadi has specialized in studying kinetics and mechanisms of gas-phase reactions and their potential utility as green methodologies in organic chemistry. She has more than 95 published papers and one patent. She is author of three review articles. 

The Creighton University Chemistry Department undertook full curriculum revision during the 2000 - 2001 academic year for both the ACS-certified major and the non-certified major. The revision was driven by the need (mandated by ACS) to include the equivalent of one semester of biochemistry in the major. We believed, at the time, that we did not have the overall expertise to add biochemistry units to existing courses and there was no room in the existing curriculum to simply add another course. The new biochemistry requirement forced a critical examination of a curriculum that had not changed in many years. 

If one wishes to obtain a fluorine NMR spectrum, one must of course first have access to a spectrometer with a probe that will allow observation of fluorine nuclei. Fortunately, most modern high-field NMR spectrometers that are available in industrial and academic research laboratories today have this capability. Probably the most common NMR spectrometers in use today for taking routine NMR spectra are 300, 400, and 500 MHz instruments, which measure proton spectra at 300, 400, and 500 MHz, carbon spectra at 75.5, 100.6, andl25.8MHz and fluorine spectra at 282, 376, and 470 MHz, respectively. For the most part, and unless otherwise mentioned, the spectra that are depicted in this book are 500 MHz for proton, 125.8 for carbon, and 282 for fluorine, and all have been obtained within the University of Florida Chemistry Department NMR facility. 

But even if most chemistry departments now have their first woman faculty member—a goal that must have seemed utopian in the early 1970s—this is just the threshold. There is no power in being the only woman, especially if only an assistant professor, who may be temporary but it can be the first step to more later on. It is just a coincidence but it seems prophetic that academic women chemists have arrived on this threshold at the start of a new millennium. How to bring about more change in the next decade and beyond is what this conference is about. Who should care more about this than women chemists themselves ... 

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