ISOTOPICS
The Cleveland Section of the American Chemical Society
Volume 87
Issue 3
On Deck:
March 2011
March Meeting Notice
Meeting-in-Miniature
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Ursuline College
April 20, 2011
Graftech, Education Night
Michael Kenney, Case Western
Reserve University
Cleveland ACS Officers
Chair:
John Protasiewicz
Department of Chemistry
Case Western Reserve Univ.
Phone: 216-368-5060
protasiewicz@case.edu
Chair-Elect:
Kat Wollyung
ACS.NCW.Kat@gmail.com
Treasurer:
John Moran
Department of Science and
Mathematics
Phone: 216-373-6380
jmoran@ndc.edu
Secretary:
Alice McFarland
mcfarlands1@earthlink.net
Cleveland Section Web Site:
http://www.csuohio.edu/sciences
/dept/cleveland_acs/
2:00 pm
2:30-5 pm
5:00 pm
6:00 pm
6:30 pm
Registration
Parallel Sessions
Plenary Speaker (Prof. Stuart Rowan)
Social Time and Dinner
Award Ceremony (while dinner continues)
Designing new stimuli-responsive materials: From sea
cucumbers to self-healing films.
Stuart J. Rowan, Institute for Advanced Materials, Case Western Reserve
University
Utilizing non-covalent interactions to access controlled molecular assemblies as well as to
influence communication between different components is a critical concept in most
biological processes and natural biomaterials. Transferring this approach to designed
synthetic polymer systems potentially opens the door to materials that exhibit unusual
structural, mechanical and functional properties. The reversible nature of the non-covalent
bond allows, when molecules are designed correctly, to access thermodynamically stable,
complex self-assembled architectures, as well to a new generation of adaptive, stimuliresponsive materials. As such the designed utilization of supramolecular chemistry in the
field of polymer science has seen a dramatic growth in the last decade or so. We have been
interested in the potential of such systems to access new material platforms and have
developed a range of new mechanically stable, supramolecular polymer films that change
their properties in response to a given stimulus, such as temperature, light or specific
chemicals.1 Such supramolecular materials have been targeted toward applications that
range from new implantable adaptive nanocomposites (Fig 1a) and healable plastics to
sensors for chemical warfare agents (Fig 1b) and thermally responsive hydrogels. Our
latest result in this area will be discussed.
DINNER RESERVATIONS REQUIRED:
Please RSVP by either by
responding to the online survey at http://tinyurl.com/CleveACS-March or by contacting
John Protasiewicz, by phone at 216-368-5060 by 5 pm on THURSDAY, March 10. (For
phone reservations, please clearly spell your last name and leave a return phone number,
and indicate choice of entree below). Cost of the dinner is $20 for members & guests, $5
for students, and $10 for retirees/unemployed. Checks made out to “Cleveland ACS” are
greatly appreciated. MENU: Choice of one of three entrées: (a) Roast beef au jus with
twice baked potatoes (b) Salmon with garden blended wild rice (c) Stuffed portabella
mushroom with garden blended with wild rice. Accompanying the meals will be fresh
vegetable medley, mixed green salad-ranch and Italian, pre-set water with lemon, rolls and
butter, coffee, decaf, iced tea, and hot tea (regular and decaf) upon request, and fruit of the
forest pie.
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Isotopics March 2011
American Chemical Society Cleveland Section
Directions to Ursuline College
Speaker Bio
http://www.ursuline.edu/About/directions.html
Stuart J. Rowan
Faculty Director, Institute for Advanced Materials
Kent Hale Smith Professor of Engineering
Sessions will be in Pilla Student Learning Center
and the Plenary lecture and dinner will be in
Daley Dining, which is inside of Fritzsche Center.
The most convenient parking will be in the Pilla
Center Lot (Lot F). If that lot is full there is
additional parking in Lots K and J behind the
Chapel of the Holy Trinity and the motherhouse.
From the Ohio Turnpike
Take the Ohio Turnpike west to Exit 187. Go
West on I-480 to I-271 North. Stay on I-271 to
Exit 32, the Brainard Road/Cedar Road East. Do
not take the first immediate right on the off ramp.
Go straight but stay in the right lane. Turn right on
Brainard Road and immediately get in the left
lane to turn left onto Cedar Road at the traffic
light. Proceed on Cedar Road, then right onto
Lander Road to the College entrance,
approximately one-quarter mile on your right.
From I-90 East or West
Take I-90 to I-271 South. Stay on I-271 to Exit
32, the Brainard Road/Cedar Road East. At the
end of the exit ramp turn left on Brainard Road
and stay in left lane to turn left onto Cedar Road
at the traffic light. Turn right on Lander Road to
the College entrance, approximately one-quarter
mile on your right.
From I-480 East or West
Take I-480 to I-271 north. Stay on I-271 to Exit
32, the Brainard Road/Cedar Road East. Do not
take the first immediate right on the off ramp. Go
straight but stay in the right lane. Turn right on
Brainard Road and immediately get in the left
lane to turn left onto Cedar Road at the traffic
light. Proceed on Cedar Road, then right onto
Lander Road to the College entrance,
approximately one-quarter mile on your right.
Dr. Rowan is currently a Full Professor in
Macromolecular Science and Engineering. He has
secondary appointments in both Biomedical
Engineering and Chemistry at Case Western
Reserve University.
Dr. Rowan was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in
1969 but grew up in Troon, Ayrshire on the west
coast of Scotland. He received his B.Sc. (Hons.)
in Chemistry in 1991 from the University of
Glasgow and stayed there for his Ph.D. where he
worked on Supramolecular Crystal Engineering of
Inclusion Compounds, receiving his Ph.D. in
1995. In 1994 he moved to the Chemistry
Department at the University of Cambridge and
carried out research on the development of
Dynamic Combinatorial Libraries in the labs of
Prof Jeremy Sanders, FRS. In 1996 he was
appointed a Research Associate of Girton College,
Cambridge. In 1998 he moved across the Atlantic
(and the continental U.S.) to continue his
postdoctoral studies at the University of
California, Los Angeles with Sir Fraser Stoddart
FRS. While in Southern California he developed
numerous new methods for the construction of
interlocked molecular species. In 1999 he was
appointed as an Assistant Professor to the
Department of Macromolecular Science and
Engineering at Case Western Reserve University
in Cleveland, Ohio and was promoted to Associate
Professor with tenure in 2005 before becoming
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Isotopics March 2011
Full Professor in 2008. In 2009 he became the
Kent H. Smith Professor of Engineering. He is
also leading up the cross campus Materials
Alliance at CWRU, which has resulted in the
development of the new Institute for Advanced
Materials (IAM). IAM is designed to enhance
materials collaboration across the schools of
Engineering, Arts and Sciences, Medicine and
Dental Medicine. He is an NSF CAREER
awardee and received the CWRU School of
Engineering Research Award in 2008. His
research interests focus on the potential of
dynamic chemistry (covalent and non-covalent) in
the construction and properties of polymeric
materials. His group works on supramolecular
polymers, self-healing materials, metal-containing
polymers, gels, biomaterials, surface assembly
and developing new synthetic methods for the
construction of complex polymeric architectures.
He is a member of the Editorial Board of the
Journal of Materials Chemistry, a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Chemistry and he also sits on the
ACS PMSE council. He is an NSF-CAREER
awardee and has published over 90 scientific
papers, book chapters and reviews.
Selected from ACS Discoveries!
Probing the mysterious second-wave of
damage in head injury patients
Why do some of the one million people who
sustain head injuries annually in United States
experience a mysterious second wave of brain
damage days after the initial injury — just when
they appear to be recovering? Limited clinical
trials using an innovative new device to monitor
brain chemistry on a second-by-second basis are
underway to answer that life-and-death question,
according to an article in Chemical & Engineering
News (C&EN), ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.
Brain injury is the leading cause of death and
disability worldwide.
C&EN Senior Editor Celia Henry Arnaud
describes a phenomenon called depolarization, in
which brain activity decreases in patients
following initial trauma. The condition involves a
American Chemical Society Cleveland Section
wave of chemical changes that spread from the
site of injury and inactivate nerve cells. Since
reactivation of these cells requires large amounts
of glucose, monitoring glucose levels in a patient’s
brain can help doctors tell whether or not a patient
is taking a turn for the worse. The article points
out that a promising new device could provide a
faster and more useful way to monitor brain
glucose than current methods, which are
inefficient.
Now in development at Imperial College London,
the new so-called “microfluidic method” measures
glucose quickly and continuously — in fractions
of a second instead of hourly. The device is
currently being tested in patients who have
suffered trauma, stroke, or aneurysm (a balloonlike enlargement of a brain artery). In the future,
the device could be used in patients with milder
forms of brain injury and used in a way that is less
invasive, the article notes.
Selected from ACS Discoveries!
Low-allergenic wines could stifle sniffles and
sneezes in millions of wine drinkers
Journal of Proteome Research
Scientists have identified a mysterious culprit that
threatens headaches, stuffy noses, skin rash and
other allergy symptoms when more than 500
million people worldwide drink wine. The
discovery could help winemakers in developing
the first low allergenic vintages — reds and whites
with less potential to trigger allergy symptoms,
they say. The new study appears in ACS’ monthly
Journal
of
Proteome
Research.
Giuseppe Palmisano and colleagues note growing
concern about the potential of certain ingredients
in red and white to cause allergy-like symptoms
that range from stuffed up noses to headaches to
difficulty breathing. So-called wine allergies occur
in an estimated 8 percent of people worldwide.
Only 1 percent of those involve sulfites, sulfurcontaining substances that winemakers add to
wine to prevent spoilage and also occur naturally.
But the wine components that trigger allergies in
the remaining 7 percent are unclear. Studies
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Isotopics March 2011
suggest that glycoproteins — proteins coated with
sugars produced naturally as grapes ferment —
may be a culprit. However, scientists knew little
about the structure and function of these
substances in wine.
Their analysis of Italian Chardonnay uncovered
28 glycoproteins, some identified for the first
time. The scientists found that many of the grape
glycoproteins had structures similar to known
allergens, including proteins that trigger allergic
reactions to ragweed and latex. The discovery
opens the door to development of wine-making
processes that minimize formation of the culprit
glycoproteins and offer consumers low-allergenic
wines.
Congratulations to Professor Joseph S.
Francisco: 2011 Morley Medal Winner
The Cleveland section of the American Chemical
Society Congratulates;
Professor Joseph S. Francisco
Department of Chemistry
Purdue University
Recipient of the 2011 Edward W. Morley Medal
American Chemical Society Cleveland Section
research fellowships including the Alfred P. Sloan
Fellowship, the John Simon Guggenheim
Fellowship, and a Cambridge University
Fellowship. Dr. Francisco has received numerous
awards for his research including the Henry
Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar Award,
Purdue University’s McCoy Award, and the Percy
L. Julian Award for Pure and Applied Research.
He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society
and the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, and was elected
President of the American Chemical Society for
2010. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed
publications in the fields of atmospheric
chemistry, chemical kinetics, quantum chemistry,
laser photochemistry and spectroscopy.
Dr.
Francisco will be presenting the Morley Lecture at
the May meeting of the Cleveland Section, on
“From Earth’s Atmosphere to Planetary
Engineering of Mars: An Adventure in
Chemistry.”
This year the Morley Presentation will take place
in conjunction with the Annual May Conference
cosponsored by the local sections of the Society
for Applied Spectroscopy and the American
chemical Society.
May Conference Call for Papers
Joseph S. Francisco, the William E. Moore
Distinguished Professor of Earth and Atmospheric
Sciences and Chemistry at Purdue University, was
selected by the Cleveland Section of the American
Chemical Society as the Morley Award recipient
for 2011.
Dr. Francisco completed his
undergraduate studies in chemistry at the
University of Texas at Austin and received his
Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He was the recipient of numerous
The 2011 May Conference will be held at the
Dolan Science Center at John Carroll University
on Wednesday June 1, 2011. The talks are 25
minutes, including 5 minutes for questions, on
topics of spectroscopy and analytical chemistry. If
you are interested in presenting please contact
Brian Perry at brian_perry@lord.com or 814-8683611 ext. 3582. The deadline for a commitment
which includes a title, and names and affiliations
of authors is March 18. The deadline for formal
abstracts will be mid to late April (see future
issues of Isotopics).
This year the ACS Morley Lecture will be
combined with the May Conference, with the
culmination of the meeting being the Morley
address. See elsewhere in this issue for
information on this year's Morley Medal recipient.
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Isotopics March 2011
American Chemical Society Cleveland Section
March Historical Events in Chemistry
By Leopold May
The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC
March 7, 1788 One hundred and seventy-five years ago in 1836, Antoine-César Becquerel, was the first
to use electrolysis to recover metals from ores. He also invented an electric thermometer
and was born on this date.
March 12, 1838 One hundred and fifty years ago in 1861, William H. Perkin with B. P. Duppa
synthesized tartaric acid. Also, he discovered mauve, the first aniline dye, in his home
laboratory in 1856, the Perkin reaction for condensation of unsaturated aromatic acids,
and coumarin. He elucidated relationship between tartaric, funaric and maleic acids and
was born on this date.
March 31, 1811 Two hundred years ago on this date, Robert Bunsen was born. One hundred and fifty
years ago in 1861, he and Gustav R. Kirchhoff discovered rubidium (Rb, 37). They also
invented the spectroscope in 1859 and discovered cesium (Cs, 55) in 1860. He invented
the Bunsen burner, filter pump, a galvanic battery, and with Henry E. Roscoe, the
actinometer.
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Cleveland State University
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l.ng@csuohio.edu
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QSC/NASA GRC
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