Chemistry & Biochemistry News

Nov 6, 2009
Daniel Buttry and colleagues earn $5.1 M grant from ARPA-E

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded Arizona State University two grants for alternative energy research that are part of a special DOE program to pursue high-risk, high-reward advances with the potential to change the way the nation generates and consumes energy.

ASU's grants, totaling more than $10 million, are among 37 new DOE grants totaling $151 million to support the program.

The first grant is entitled "Sustainable, High-Energy Density, Low-Cost Electrochemical Energy Storage - Metal-Air Ionic Liquid (MAIL) Batteries" and has been awarded to Daniel Buttry (co-PI) professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Cody Friesen (PI) and Karl Sieradzki (co-PI) , both from the School of Mechanical, Aerospace, Chemical and Materials Engineering. This two year grant is for $5.1 M and aims to develop a new class of metal-air batteries using ionic liquids, with multiple times the energy density of today's lithium-ion batteries. If this project is successful it will create a game-changing new battery technology that will enable rapid and widespread deployment of long range, low cost plug in hybrid and all-electric vehicles, shifting U.S. transport energy to the grid and drastically reducing U.S. oil imports. The PIs will work with researchers from Fluidic Energy Inc., on the project.

The second grant is for $5.2 M and was awarded to Wim Vermaas (PI), a professor in ASU's School of Life Sciences and the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis. The grant will fund work on a form of photosynthetic bacteria called cyanobacteria that are modified to over-produce and secrete fatty acids for biofuel feedstocks using just sunlight, water and carbon dioxide as inputs. ASU researchers will work with scientists from North Carolina State University and Diversified Energy on the project.

"ASU is the only university to be heading up two of these highly competitive projects," said Sethuraman "Panch" Panchanathan, ASU's deputy vice president for research and economic affairs."

DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program has the goal of developing nimble, creative and inventive approaches to transform the global energy landscape while advancing America's technology leadership.

Nov 2, 2009
Spencer Silver, chemistry alumnus, receives College Hall of Fame Award

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU held its annual awards and hall of fame luncheon last Friday in the alumni lounge of the Memorial Union. This year the Alumni Hall of Fame Award went to Spencer Silver, a graduate of our department. (Shown in the photos are Dr. Spencer Silver, Dean Quentin Wheeler presenting the award, and Dr. Silver with his wife Linda Silver and Dr. William Petuskey, chair of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department.)

Spencer Silver earned an ASU bachelor's degree in chemistry in 1962 and a doctorate in 1966 from the University of Colorado. He was a 3M scientist when he invented a microsphere adhesive, comprised of tiny bubbles, that caused the substance to stick only slightly to surfaces. Years later, 3M colleague Art Fry came up with a practical use for the glue - Post-it® Notes.

In recent years, with more than two dozen patents to his credit, Silver has turned his creative energy to art and is an accomplished painter in pastels and oils.

"My desire is to find an artistic bridge between the practical and theoretical aspects of chemistry and the allegorical and fantasy world of images from plants and landscape," he writes on his Web site www.spencerfsilver.com. With a laboratory that is now a studio, Silver says of his art: "You will see lots of trees, leaves, flowers and whirly things with dots and dashes that try to deal with chemistry in a non-deterministic way."

In 2004, Silver was selected to the University of Colorado Heritage Center's "Hall of Excellence." He also is the 1998 recipient of the Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society, which is given to an inventor for the successful application of research in chemistry or chemical engineering that contributes to the material prosperity and happiness of people.

Dr. Silver has been published in numerous and varied professional and peer-reviewed journals, interviewed on NPR, and profiled in many articles. In 1995 he was invited to The White House to receive the National Medal of Technology Award.

Upon accepting the award Silver reminisced about memorable times when he worked in the laboratory of Duane Brown (Professor of Chemistry at ASU :1951-'83) performing various analyses on germanium, gallium and gold. He also said that attending ASU in the '60s was "like going to school in a construction zone", and he's "glad to see that nothing's changed!"

Oct 31, 2009
2009 Alumni reception and Homecoming a success...

The annual chemistry and biochemistry alumni homecoming reception was held on the evening of October 30th in the University Club. William Petuskey, department chair, updated the 100 plus attendees on recent faculty achievements, research successes and awards.

Devens Gust, director of the new Energy Frontier Research Center, spoke about the $14M center which will focus on using the fundamentals of photosynthesis to unlock new sources of energy.

Chemistry alumnus, Gary Dirks, director of the new ASU Lightworks initiative, spoke about how Lightworks will position ASU as a leader in solar-based energy and other light-inspired research.

ASU Homecoming was held on October 31st and the department was out in force welcoming thousands of campus visitors. Members of the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society were in attendance, freezing bubbles with dry ice, making bouncy balls with a polymerization reaction and in keeping with the Halloween theme they served up a multi-colored (pH dependent) witches' brew. This was complimented by a "hands - on" demonstration of the science of slime which showed off both the variety found in toy stores and a different and much slimier one used on many movie sets. The students also made multi-colored "elephant's toothpaste", which is made by the iodide-catalyzed degradation of hydrogen peroxide. As can be seen from the adjacent photo this demo was particularly popular! To top everything off, they demonstrated various changes of state with the help of liquid nitrogen.

Oct 30, 2009
Elizabeth McCullum, recipient of $100,000 postdoctoral fellowship

Elizabeth McCullum is the 2008-2009 recipient of the two-year $100,000 postdoctoral fellowship awarded by the National Ladies Auxiliary to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States. She is a cancer researcher at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. A panel of cancer specialists reviewed applications from throughout the country before selecting Dr. McCullum, who earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry/nanotechnology from our department in spring 2009 under the tutelage of John Chaput.

Dr. McCullum's research project focuses on developing a new strategy to combat drug-resistant breast cancer. She works in a lab which has proposed the novel concept of disrupting the normal association of a complex of proteins called cohesion that cells require for successful cell division. Dr. McCullum will try a unique molecular screening process to identify small protein fragments that block this formation, leading to abnormal separation of genetic material in the rapidly growing cancer cells, in the hope of triggering their self-destruction. Once the protein is identified, Dr. McCullum will design a nanoparticle delivery system, which will hold the peptide inhibitors to target and destroy breast cancer cells. While early-stage breast cancer often has a good prognosis, the five-year survival rate is only 50 percent for local advanced breast cancer with multimodal therapy. The majority of women who relapse after therapy for early stage or local advanced disease often have metastatic disease, and their five-year survival rate is only 5-10 percent. Thus the urgent need for new approaches to improve disease-free survival for patients with recurrences, approaches that ultimately reduce the incidence of long-term, treatment-related complications in all patients. By the conclusion of her fellowship, Dr. McCullum expects to have designed a class of therapeutic drugs that can effectively disrupt chromosomal cohesion, stop cells from multiplying and trigger cell death in treatment of breast cancer cells. In addition to the fellowship, research grants totaling $175,000 have been presented by the Ladies Auxiliary to institutions around the country during the past year.

Financial assistance is also given to cancer-stricken Auxiliary members in their personal battles against the disease. During 2008-2009, more than 3,000 grants totaling $1,430,600 were distributed; more than $50 million in grants have aided members with cancer over the past 58 years.

In addition to fighting cancer, the 550,000 members of the Auxiliary award scholarships to students, volunteer in hospitals, protect veterans' entitlements, promote good citizenship, and provide care packages as well as prepaid long-distance telephone cards to troops deployed in the War on Terror. For more information, go to www.ladiesauxvfw.org.

Oct 30, 2009
Rebekka Wachter (PI) and Marcia Levitus (co-PI) awarded $.75M DOE grant to study part of the photosynthetic process...

The Regulation of Carbon Fixation in Plants and Green Algae
The Department of Energy grant is from the Office of Basic Energy Sciences and has been awarded for five years.

Although several components of the photosynthetic apparatus are known to be susceptible to moderate heat stress, a number of studies have suggested that the CO₂-fixing enzyme Rubisco embodies a primary limiting factor of net photosynthesis. The carboxylation efficiency of Rubisco is reduced by heat-induced active-site occlusion, a mechanism that can be reversed with the aid of enzymes that function as ATP-driven molecular motors.

Wachter and Levitus are utilizing biophysical methods to elucidate the function of these remodeling enzymes, known to be essential in maintaining Rubisco activity. They hope that this research will be useful in the development of reliable models to predict biomass production under moderate heat stress conditions. A deeper understanding of the regulation of carbon assimilation at the molecular level may open avenues for improving the efficiency of net photosynthesis under altered temperature and CO₂ conditions arising from global climate change.  

Oct 23, 2009
Pierre Herckes and Hilairy Hartnett have earned prestigious NSF CAREER awards...

Two ASU faculty members have earned Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The CAREER program is NSF’s most prestigious, and supports the early career development activities of teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the mission of their organization. It provides five-year research grants to each recipient.

The CAREER award winners are Pierre Herckes, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; and Hilairy Hartnett an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. ASU junior faculty were awarded six CAREER awards earlier this year.

full story in ASU News

Oct 12, 2009
Marcia Levitus receives 2010 I-APS Young Investigator Award...

Congratulations are in order for Marcia Levitus who has just been awarded the 2010 Inter-American Photochemical Society Young Investigator Award. The award groups photochemists and photophysicists from the whole American continent. It was established in 2002 to recognize outstanding photoscientific contributions by Society members who have held an independent research position for no more than five years at the time of application. The 2010 I-APS Young Investigator Award will be presented at the 20th I-APS Winter Conference to be held in St. Pete Beach, FL January 2-5, 2010. Marcia will present an award lecture and will receive up to $1000 to help cover expenses for participation in the Conference as well as a conference registration waiver.

In his congratulatory letter, Bruce Armitage, (Professor of Chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University) stated that, "the awards committee was impressed with your accomplishments to date and your promise for future success. Warmest congratulations on this well deserved award."

From left to right, Vanessa Evans, Jessica Lagreid, also a senior at ASU, Mercedes Hendrix and Katie Dempsey Photo courtesy of the Fiesta Bowl

Oct 8, 2009
Biochemistry senior named Fiesta Bowl Queen

Last night at the Scottsdale Plaza resort hotel, Mercedes Hendrix, biochemistry senior was crowned the 2009 Fiesta Bowl Queen. Mercedes is a member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. She is involved with many local philanthropies, volunteering with John C. Lincoln North Mountain, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Arizona and mentors with the President Barack Obama Scholars Program at ASU. Hendrix resides in Phoenix and is an alumna of Bourgade Catholic High School as well as the Math-Science Honors Program in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU.

The Fiesta Bowl Queen & Court will serve as ambassadors for the 2009-2010 Fiesta Bowl Festival of College Football. Each Court member was selected based not only upon her academic achievements plus community service but also poise, personality and writing skills. A huge scholarship opportunity, the Queen & Court act as official spokespersons for the Fiesta Bowl's events, Board of Directors, Committee, volunteers, staff and sponsors. Each fall, hundreds of young women from across Arizona compete for the opportunity to serve as Fiesta Bowl Court members.

full story

Sep 28, 2009
Gary Dirks, department alumnus, to lead LightWorks solar research initiative...

ASU has selected Gary Dirks as director of LightWorks, a new initiative to position the university as a leader in solar-based energy and other light-inspired research. Dirks is the former president of BP Asia-Pacific and BP China. LightWorks will capitalize on ASU's unique strengths in renewable energy fields including artificial photosynthesis, biofuels and next-generation photovoltaics. LightWorks will eventually broaden to include other light-based projects, such as lasers for biomedical applications and energy-efficient lighting.

"Gary Dirks will help position Arizona nationally and globally as a leader in renewable energy and light-based research," says ASU President Michael Crow. "Gary's broad range of experience will help us meet President Obama's challenge to lead a green revolution and develop clean sources of energy."

Dirks received his doctorate in chemistry from ASU in 1980. He was the first doctoral student to work with Devens Gust, Thomas Moore and Ana Moore in ASU's Center for the Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis (now the Center for Bioenergy and Photosynthesis).

full story...

Hao Yan (left) and Yan Liu in the lab

Sep 8, 2009
Hao Yan and coworkers receive $ multi-million grants...

Hao Yan and co-PIs Yan Liu and Stuart Lindsay plus subcontractors from other institutions have just received a $3M plus grant for DNA-based Molecular-Scale Nanofabrication. The award is from the Office of Naval research (ONR). With this ONR Basic Research Challenge grant, they aim to use DNA-based self-assembly to fabricate three-dimensional (3D), molecular-scale components. Their primary goal is to solve the technical problems that stand in the way of developing 3D DNA nanostructures into functional self-assembled materials, with a particular emphasis on photonic applications. The project will focus on efforts to build periodic and non-periodic 3D DNA structures, nanoscale scaffolds for photonic components, and chemical modifications of the DNA scaffolds themselves to produce functional materials. This research will provide various new and significant approaches to DNA-based nanofabrication. The project ultimately seeks to go beyond the evident limits confronting current top-down techniques for the fabrication of nanodevices. This will lead to smaller, faster, and more diverse devices that will be of value to Naval needs.

Hao Yan and co-PIs Yan Liu, Stuart Lindsay and Deidre Meldrum have also been awarded a second $1.5M grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their project is entitled, Water Soluble Nanoarrays for Single Cell Analysis.

Remarkable progress in single cell genomics rests on the polymerase chain reaction. There is no analogous tool to probe the cell-to-cell distribution of protein diversity and posttranslational modification (PTM) patterns at the few- or single-cell level. If protein-capture arrays can be synthesized on a molecular scale, then the arrays themselves become reagents suitable for incubation with the contents of even a single cell. The team proposes to integrate four new technologies to develop self-assembled nanoarrays for protein analysis. Their goal is to fill a unique niche in proteomics: parallel analysis of minute amounts of protein from small numbers of (potentially individual) cells. Can they make suitable ligands and will they work on arrays? Can they read the arrays accurately with atomic force microscopy (AFM)? Can they synthesize ligands that are highly selective for posttranslational modifications (PTM)? What factors cause biodegradation of the arrays, and how can we control them while maintaining sensitivity and selectivity? What conditions are required to exploit the arrays for proteomics in a microfluidic system? What methodologies can they employ to deposit nanoliter solutions of reacted arrays at precise locations for AFM readout? These questions are the focus of this proposal. If successful, this work will make it possible to correlate nucleic acid diversity with the corresponding protein PTM diversity on a cell-by-cell basis, yielding, for the first time, data on the interplay between genome, gene expression, the environment and the spectrum of protein posttranslational modifications: the 'protein language'.

Sep 8, 2009
Ariel Anbar and Ranko Richert promoted to full professors

Ariel Anbar and Ranko Richert are to be congratulated for their promotions to full professor, effective Aug. 16, 2009.

Professor Anbar's research employs novel analytical methods to study modern and ancient environments. His aim is to understand the history of the habitability of the Earth, and the prospects for the existence of habitable worlds orbiting other stars. Specifically, Anbar pioneered the use of high precision mass spectrometry to measure minute variations in the isotope compositions and abundances of transition elements in environmental materials, including ancient sedimentary rocks. These analyses are yielding new insights, particularly into the history of trace nutrients in the oceans and oxygen in the atmosphere. His findings have been published in multiple papers in Science and Nature, and he is the Principal Investigator of a $6.5 million award to ASU from the NASA Astrobiology Institute. He directs ASU's transdisciplinary astrobiology program.

The experimental research in Professor Richert's group addresses the physical chemistry of soft condensed matter, using optical spectroscopy and dielectric relaxation. He is interested in understanding relaxation phenomena in disordered materials, and his papers interpreting their non-exponential character are extremely well known and highly cited. He has done definitive work on interfacial and geometric confinement effects, and most recently has settled the debate over the existence of non-thermal effects that are needed to explain the advantages of microwave heating over conventional heating in acceleration of chemical processes. His research has been published in 173 articles, multiple times in Physical Review Letters. He has received $1M plus funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Petroleum Research Fund.

Sep 2, 2009
John Kouvetakis appointed JES Associate Editor

Congratulations to John Kouvetakis who has recently been appointed as an Associate Editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. This prestigious three year appointment will cover such topics as semiconductor devices, materials and processing, solid state chemistry and physical/chemical properties of materials as well as thin film growth by chemical vapor deposition and molecular beam epitaxy. Also included in Professor Kouvetakis's area of expertise will be silicon-based science and technology, including his own area of research namely silicon- photonics. Professor Kouvetakis's research activities bridge the areas of inorganic chemistry, applied physics and materials science of semiconductor and refractory materials.

Aug 27, 2009
Department welcomes new faculty member Vladimiro Mujica

Professor Vladimiro Mujica, who recently joined the department, comes from Northwestern University where he was a chemistry research professor. He also held a joint appointment with Argonne National Laboratory. He has been a visiting professor at universities in Spain, France, Korea, Germany, Israel and Sweden. Before joining Northwestern, he was a chemistry professor at the Central University in Venezuela, his home country, where he also was a member of the National Research Council board of directors. Mujica's research focuses on theoretical chemistry. He is a leading expert in molecular electronics where he did groundbreaking work in developing models to explain electronic transport across molecules in nanodevices. He is currently interested in charge transfer in interfaces, a subject of considerable practical interest in solar energy.

Aug 27, 2009
Forty new graduate students on board

The department is excited to welcome 40 new graduate students into the chemistry and biochemistry programs for fall semester 2009. They have come from various universities across the US and six additional countries including China, India, Iran, Japan, Kenya, and Poland; bringing with them a diversity of cultural and academic backgrounds. Students were selected from over 500 applications that were carefully reviewed by our Admissions Committee.

International students arrived at the beginning of August to review and practice their English skills. The remaining students joined them a week later for orientation and teaching assistant training. Faculty helped welcome our new students by giving individual presentations on the research in their labs and meeting them informally during a "Meet and Greet" luncheon. Twenty-eight faculty members participated in the talks, which gave our new students a great introduction to a number of innovative and interdisciplinary research opportunities for them to explore.

The department warmly welcomes these new students and looks forward to guiding them through their academic careers.

Aug 25, 2009
Liquids and Glasses community celebrates Angell's 75 years

Physicists, chemists and materials scientists from as far away as Brazil and Australia gathered in Vancouver in June for a symposium to recognize Austen Angell's contributions to the field as he passed another milestone in his long career. Organized by Jeff Yarger, Pierre Lucas and Steve Martin, (the latter two being active members in the American Ceramic Society - ACERS) the symposium held as part of the ACERS spring meeting was a big success, scientifically and personally. Jeff Yarger in his introduction, pointed out that since normal retirement age, Angell's group has published over 100 papers, ten of which are already "famous " (by the Thompson Scientific criterion of >100 cites), and shows no sign of stopping. Indeed, by October Angell will have given his third conference-opening lecture of the year, and he has already said, "yes" to 7 international organizations for 2010. He runs a small but productive group funded by the NSF and ARO, and looks forward to many more years of scientific excitement.  

Aug 25, 2009
Devens Gust: President's Podcast on Energy Frontier Research Center...

A recent column in the Arizona Daily Star described why research universities are of significant importance to Arizona. This podcast, part two in a special series, highlights the relevance and benefits of university research at ASU. Dr. Devens Gust, Foundation Professor in ASU's Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry and Director of ASU's Energy Frontier Research Center, talks about his innovative solar energy research, the role teaching plays in discovery and the potentially meaningful outcomes of his work.

ASUPresidentsOfficePodcast168.mp3 (click to listen)

Aug 25, 2009
Fall Welcome for New Undergrads

A campus wide orientation for new undergraduate students was held last Friday, August 21. We currently have over a thousand chemistry/biochemistry undergraduate majors enrolled in the department, including our largest freshmen class of 335 students. This number has grown by a remarkable 20 - 25 percent for each of the last eight years. Incoming students and their parents were welcomed by our academic advisors and attended a talk given by Professor William Petuskey, Chair of the department in H150. Chad McAllister and John Blanchard also introduced the Learning and Resource Center and the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society (SAACS) respectively. The large group then split in two and toured the Chemistry Collaborative Learning Center (CCLC - pictured at right). This center is a multimedia learning environment for tutorials in our General Chemistry classes. The other half of the group remained in H150 and was entertained with a spectacular series of chemical demonstrations by Gary Mansour entitled "What Chemistry is All About".

Aug 19, 2009
In Memoriam -Richard S. Juvet, Jr. (1931-2009)

Richard Juvet, long-time Professor of Chemistry, died in Phoenix on July 20. Born in Hollywood, CA, he retired after 25 years with Arizona State University as Professor Emeritus (Analytical Chemistry). He also spent 15 years teaching at the University of Illinois. Richard received his doctorate from UCLA. In addition to teaching, he conducted research, primarily on gas chromatography, at Cambridge University (England), Ecole Polytechnique (France), University of Vienna and Taiwan University. He was the national chairman of the American Chemical Society's (ACS) Analytical Chemistry Division (1972-73), and national president of Alpha Chi Sigma, the national chemistry fraternity. Richard also served as a member of the ACS Division Executive Committee for 21 years, as National ACS Councilor for 11 years, and as Editorial Advisor to Analytical Chemistry, Journal of Gas Chromatography, Journal of Chromatographic Science, and Analytica Chimica Acta. He enjoyed camping, cooking, world travel, ham radio operation and playing his beloved classical Allen organ. He is survived by his wife, Evelyn Elthon Juvet; daughter Victoria L. Prins (Lee), sons David Allan Juvet (Tricia), Stephen Mitchell Juvet and Richard Preston Juvet, and grandchildren Amy Joy Taylor and Robert Victor Taylor.