Year: 2019

The Department of Chemistry would like to announce the recipients of the recipients of the 2019 Mandel Fellowships, an award made possible by a gift established in honor of Dr. Frederick Mandel. This year’s recipients are:

• Hall, Katja
• Huang, Sisi
• Sithumini, Menisha
• Liang, Weixiong
• Lu, Zhuomin
• Benavides, Paola
• Cao, Liaoran

Join me in congratulating the awardees, who have achieved an outstanding level of productivity since their arrival to our program. We are thankful for their contribution and we expect that this award contributes to their professional development and success. Also join me in thanking the selection committee (Leah, Boni, Ken, and Bill) for their work.

Ebube Oyeka has been awarded the COSSAB GIAR grant for the 2019-2020 academic year. He joined the department this semester and is already assisting with Dr. Tran with her new lab. His research will focus on designing new materials exhibiting topological magnetic spin textures with potential applications in spintronics technology.

Congratulations!!!

We encourage all to take advantage of these opportunities!

• Surviving Home and Jared Lyon Keynote. Clemson graduate student vet, Tracey Cooper-Harris, is featured in Surviving Home sharing her experiences suing and WINNING against the VA so her wife could gain military dependent benefits. She, along with her wife and the producer and director of the documentary, will be at the viewing to host a Q&A after the viewing. It will be great!

• A Green Zone Training is also occurring this week. This is an excellent training to learn how to best support student vets and military-connected individuals.
•  On Friday, the CEO of Student Veterans of America, Jared Lyon, will be speaking to the campus on the contributions of student vets to Higher Ed and how we can support our vets.

Ellen is moving to the Chemistry Department from the Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences Department where she was the Office Manager. She was the Chair’s assistant along with handling payroll and HR duties. Prior to EEES she had held an Administrative Assistant position in Chemistry handling A/P and accounting duties. She grew up in Clemson and graduated from Clemson University in 1987 with a B.S. in PRTM. She has two daughters; one is a nurse living in Charleston, SC and the other, is a dental assistant living in Washington State with her husband and their son. Ellen is an outdoor enthusiast and animal lover. She has a menagerie of horses, dogs and cats. She enjoys boating on Lake Hartwell and attending dog competitions with her fiancée, Matt Culbreath. She’s a big Clemson fan who attends as many football games as possible and is looking forward the upcoming Clemson softball season!

Monica Spritzky graduated Magna Cum Laude with a BS in Chemistry in May 2019. She was hired by BD as a Chemist working in the Analytical Laboratory located in Covington, GA. Her work consists of performing quantitative and qualitative tests on various products and samples from various locations and divisions of BD using AA, ICP-MS, HPLC, GC-MS, FTIR, in addition to other techniques. Monica values her ability to have hands on experience with almost every instrument and technique required for her new job while at Clemson University. She credits her success to her research in the Casabianca and Whitehead groups and her two industry internships as well as the guidance of her professors. Monica loved her time as a Clemson tiger and as a member of the Clemson Chemistry Department.

Congratulations to Laura McCann, who received one of the prestigious Goldwater Scholarships.

These scholarships were awarded from an estimated pool of over 5,000 college sophomores and juniors, attending 443 academic institutions across the country. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. The Goldwater Scholarship is the preeminent undergraduate award of its type in these fields.

Laura joined our program about three years ago as part of the EUREKA! Program. The intent of the scholarship is to provide support for students and place them in a lab during the summer, so they are exposed to graduate-level research, and Laura got really excited about the possibility to apply a simple dye (that selectively binds to proteins) to understand the driving forces and consequences of the interaction of proteins with cellulose; a rather simple problem that has tremendous consequences for the rational development and implementation of paper-based microfluidic devices. Results of that project have been published in Analyst 142 (2017) 3899 – 3905.

Laura also participated in our program US-Brazil – International Research Experience for Students: Analytical Applications of Nanomaterials and Microfluidic Devices, funded by the National Science Foundation. As part of this experience, Laura traveled to Sao Paulo and performed research leading to the selective oxidation of cellulose and the insertion of a controlled density of functional groups. These chemical groups would enable anchoring reagents in specific parts of the device and tackle the development of color gradients, one of the most significant problems with these devices. Although this semester Laura is in Seville studying Spanish, she will soon be heading to San Jose, CA to participate in the 2019  Nuclear Chemistry Summer School. Laura also recently received the Warwick Chemical Foundation Award in Chemistry.

Without a question, Laura is a true inspiration for other students and we can’t be any happier.

Congrats again!!!!

We are extremely proud to announce the latest addition to the team: Dr. Thanh Thao Tran, who will join the Department of Chemistry in the Fall 2019 as Assistant Professor. 

The Tran Laboratory will focus on understanding and overcoming fundamental challenges in energy and information technology research by applying the approaches of synthetic inorganic solid-state chemistry. Chemically controlled synthesis and design will be used to target new systems, and structure and property characterizations (e.g., advanced synchrotron X-ray, time-of-flight neutron scattering, spectroscopic methods and electronic properties) will aid in understanding of materials. The group will then correlate structural details of materials with their physical properties in the development of materials to meet the demands of our future society in energy, for example, new materials for quantum computation and semiconductors for solar energy conversion. Our research program allows each graduate student to learn synthetic techniques, characterize their materials, and collaborate with scientists in the field.

You can read more about Dr. Tran’s contributions here.

Congrats to Prof. Dan Whitehead who will receive the 2019 Dr. Fred Bisplinghoff FPRF Innovation Award from the Fats & Proteins Research Foundation and the National Renderers Association for his group’s work on functional nanomaterials for odor mitigation and environmental remediation.

The award presentation will be part of the fall convention to be held October 28 – November 1, 2019 at the Park Hyatt Aviara Carlsbad, CA.

Following an annual tradition,  the Department of Chemistry held its 2018 Student Honors and Awards ceremony on April 13 in the Auditorium of Hunter Hall.

“Our students worked very hard for many years and we would like to recognize not only their efforts but also the incredible support from their families and friends” said Bill Pennington, chair of the department of chemistry and professor of inorganic chemistry at Clemson University.

For Anthony Spyropoulos, recipient of the American Institute of Chemists Award, this was a particularly important milestone. His father, who was present at the event, had also received the award back in 1981 from the University of Maryland.

Without a question, this is one of the most important days for the Department and we are extremely proud of their accomplishments.

The recipients of this year’s awards are:

1. Outstanding Student in General Chemistry Award
Megan Noonan
2. Outstanding Student in Introductory Chemistry Award
Isabell Boomhower
3. Chemical Rubber Company Award
Pamela Bretscher
4. Outstanding Student in Organic Chemistry Award
Ashley Jacoby
5. Houghton Mifflin/ICUC First Year Chemistry Award
Nicholas Coradi
6. Outstanding Sophomore Chemistry Major Award
Judson (Blake) Parker
7. Undergraduate Award in Analytical Chemistry
Harrison Howell
8. Undergraduate Award in Inorganic Chemistry
Joseph Ondus
9. Undergraduate Award in Organic Chemistry
Victoria Iannelli
10. Undergraduate Award in Physical Chemistry
Mary Lentz
11. American Institute of Chemists Award
Anthony Spyropoulos
12. Merck Index Award
Morgan Duffy
13. Senior Researcher Award
Lauren Skrajewski
14. Chemistry Faculty Award
Rebecca Fantone
15. American Chemical Society Award
Rebecca Fantone
16. Chemistry Outreach Award
Katherine Youmans
17. Graduate Faculty Award
Monica Gordillo
18. Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award in Chemistry
Tatiana Estrada-Mendoza and Erina Mills
19. Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award in Chemistry
Chandima Narangoda
20. Warwick Chemical Foundation Award in Chemistry
Laura McCann
21. Mark Bernhard Hardin Award in Chemistry
Monica Spritzky

If you want to see all the pictures from the event, please visit this link.