Division of Chemical Education

Greetings from the Program Committee of the Division of Chemical Education!

Even though we hope you are getting ready to come join us for the Philly meeting in August, we are also working behind the scenes, gearing up for the Spring 2017 meeting in San Francisco.

This note is to solicit your suggested symposia - something that you might like to organize for this meeting. Proposals are solicited for any chemical education-related topic. It would be especially great to have proposals related to the meeting's primary theme: Advanced Materials, Technologies, Systems and Processes. 

The 2016 Spring ConfChem online conference has begun. The title of this conference is "Science, Disarmament, and Diplomacy in Chemical Education: The Example of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons". This conference will run May 2 - June 30, 2016. Visit http://confchem.ccce.divched.org/2016SpringConfChem to participate.

DivCHED member Jaime Curtis-Fisk, PhD, is featured in the ACS What Chemists Do video series. Dr. Curtis-Fisk is a formulation scientist at the Dow Chemical Company. Curtis-Fisk uses her knowledge in polymer chemistry to create ingredients that are applicable to our everyday life. Take a watch as Curtis-Fisk's explains her work at Dow and what she sees as a common challenge for female scientists in the workplace. Take a look at the video below.

by Jordan Harshman

Fresh from graduate school, I was really looking forward to my first shot at teaching at the University of Iowa. Being a visiting assistant professor was finally my time where I could exercise autonomy and teach the class how I wanted to teach it. No more being a teaching assistant where everything was prescribed for me, no more asking anyone else “is it okay if a student does x, y, or z?”

The ACS Division of Chemical Education (DivCHED) and Society Committee on Education (SOCED) created a task force last year to propose a process by which general chemistry performance expectations could be developed. A draft report has been written to summarize how this could be done and both DivCHED and SOCED would like your feedback. A copy of this draft report can be downloaded here. Please send your comments/feeback to Dr. Donald J. Wink at dwink@uic.edu.

If you see a fork in the road, take it!
As a beginning researcher wondering how I was going to make anything out of my interest in chemistry education, the international travel award from the CHED International Activities Committee was just such a fork. And boy, am I glad I took it!

The ACS Division of Chemical Health and Safety (DCHAS) is pleased to announce that it is now extending DCHAS member registration discounts to ACS DivCHED members for day long chemical safety workshops held at the ACS national meetings in 2016.