Greetings DivCHED Members!
Well, I have to say, it’s been a VERY eventful start to my time as Chair. As I’m sure you all know by now, we will not be meeting in Philadelphia for the Spring national meeting and like many of you, I am currently in the process of trying to figure out how I can reasonably (and hopefully effectively) teach chemistry on-line. That being said, DivCHED leadership, including our many committee chairs, have been working diligently behind the scenes to try to maintain or reschedule all the great work, events, and symposia that were planned during the Spring meeting. If you’re involved with any of our committees be on the lookout for emails and virtual meetings (if you haven’t been inundated with them already) and THANK YOU for all you do for the Division!
Despite the recent turn of events, I want to highlight some of the great things currently happening within the Division. First, we officially have a Public Relations and Communication Committee, chaired by Stephen Prilliman, which is already hard at work! I very much look forward to working with them this year and hope their efforts lead to more, and more effective communication within Division membership as well as to those outside the Division.
Running concurrently to this, Jon Holmes and Heather Johnson (among others) have been diligently working to give the DivCHED Website a much needed facelift while also moving the site on to the ChemEdX server. I am excited to see the “sneak peek” and hope the website will be live sometime by the end of March. Keep your eyes out for it and thanks to Jon, Heather and many others for all your work on this project!
Finally, I am happy to report that the ACS Webinar DivCHED co-sponsored, The Secret Lives of Snowflakes, by Ken Libbrecht on January 30th, was a huge success! The webinar had 638 sites tune in for the live broadcast (including several K-12 schools) with an additional 369 people watching the recording within the first 24 hours. I personally had a blast and hope the Division can stay active in ACS Webinars in the future.
I wish you all good health and peace moving into what I anticipate will be interesting times (to say the least)!