Author: Stephen Creager

In the midst of Winter, one looks forward to Spring and the promise of new beginnings. I hope the Holiday season has brought you renewal and encouraged plans for the New Year. The Chemistry Department is part of a new ecosystem and is looking forward to fresh plantings in the coming year.

After 32-years as a faculty member in the Chemistry Department and the last several as Chair, I plan to retire this coming summer. It has been an exciting and challenging journey and I am thankful for the opportunities over the years to teach, engage in research, and serve various communities. I am especially grateful for the generosity of my colleagues in allowing me to play the resident philosopher. Although learning the nuts and bolts of institutional structure and operation and the fluid dynamics of human interaction has been a mixed blessing, the challenges have been magnified this year as the new College of Science begins to build a foundation in the midst of many uncertainties. Concurrent with a search for a Dean of the College, a committee has been formed to search for a new Department Chair.

Chemistry Faculty are serving in various capacities in the College. Brian Dominy has assumed the position of Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. Darryl DesMarteau has completed his affiliation with the Tobey-Beaudrot Chaired Professorship and we are looking to fill the position with an internal candidate. Jeff Anker, Dev Arya, Joe Kolis and Ken Marcus have had a very successful year in grant funding and the faculty are enthusiastically engaged in research and teaching. Bill Pennington, Carlos Garcia and Tania Houjeiry won a NSF REU award and the inaugural class of undergraduate summer research participants will work with faculty this summer. Last year’s faculty search has successfully concluded with the hiring of Sourav Saha, an organic chemist with a research program in materials chemistry. Laura Lanni, William McWhorter and MyCia Cox joined the department as Lecturers.

Quite a number of Graduate Students have completed their degrees since our last Newsletter. Students graduating with a Ph.D. include Vibhor Agrawal (Dominy) and Carlos Angele-Martinez (Brumaghim) in May, Tingting Han (Dominy), Daniel Hercules (Thrasher), Zhe Jia (Dominy), Liuwei Jiang (Marcus), Melissa Rogalski (Anker), Jamie Shetzline (Creager) and Daniel Willett (Chumanov) in August and McKenzie Campbell (Whitehead), Yi Jin (Chumanov), Yinling Liu (Dominy), and Alfredo Picado-Valenzuela (Dieter) in December. Dani Dong (Pennington/Wetzler), Paul Haupt-Renaud (Marcus) and Sara Jones (Marcus) graduated with the M.S. degree.

We are excited to be part of the New College of Science and look forward to the opportunities for synergistic engagement with our sister departments in the college. I hope that you find our electronic Newsletter to be an effective and useful mechanism for keeping you abreast of the developments in the department. As always, we appreciate your support and hope that you will keep in touch with us.

Three new lecturers were added to the chemistry department faculty in August 2016, to teach general chemistry and organic chemistry.  They each bring unique skills and perspectives to our department that we highly value.  Here is some more information about them. Welcome!

Dr. Laura Lanni, a new chemistry lecturer, completed her doctorate at the University of South Carolina in 2010. She has taught general and organic chemistry at Newberry College and USC, and researched boronate ester-linked polymers of intrinsic microporosity at Newberry College. Prior to graduate school, she worked as a high school advanced placement chemistry teacher for 11 years. With a B.S. in engineering chemistry from Oakland University, her first professional position was as a development chemist in automotive coatings at BASF. Her two daughters both graduated from Clemson, and the whole Lanni family, especially her husband, are crazy Clemson football fans. Besides her love for chemistry, Dr. Lanni writes fiction—her debut novel, OR NOT TO BE, was published in 2014.

Will McWhorter’s initial interest in chemistry was sparked by his Spartanburg High School chemistry teacher’s, Mrs. Nancy Bane and Mr. Troy Bridges. As an undergraduate at Clemson University, he became interested in organic chemistry as he studied and carried out undergraduate research under the direction of Prof. John Huffman (Clemson University, emeritus) graduating with a B.S. in 1978. At Harvard University, he studied natural products synthesis under the guidance of Prof. Yoshito Kishi, participating in the synthesis of palytoxin. He also studied organic syntheses in the classroom under Prof. Elias J. Corey. After obtaining his Ph.D. in 1984, Dr. McWhorter carried out postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zuerich) under Prof. Albert Eschenmoser and at the Suntory Institute for Bioorganic Research in Osaka under Prof. Koji Nakanish. He worked as a medicinal chemist at the Upjohn Company and its successors in Japan and Kalamazoo, MI and later worked as a research and development chemist at Milliken and Company in Spartanburg, SC. Dr. McWhorter is teaching general chemistry (CH1010 and CH1020). He is a masters swimmer and enjoys serving as a USA and YMCA swimming official at meets.

Dr. MyCia Cox is a Nanoscale Scientist who obtained her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina. Her research background is in Design and Characterization techniques of Optical Metamaterials and Nanoscale Materials. She enjoys spending time with her family, Astronomy, and constructing new teaching paradigms for her classes and beyond.

Clemson chemistry has two principal student groups, the undergraduate student affiliate chapter of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and the Chemistry Graduate Student Organization (CGSO).  Both groups have been active.  The CGSO group has hosted many science outreach activities including a lab coat and goggle demonstration at Daniel High School, they have participated in local charity work with the Anderson County Habitat for Humanity project, and they have hosted a variety of social events including a welcome picnic for new graduate students, tailgate parties for Clemson football, and many other things.  More information on the CGSO Group may be found on their Facebook page, at this link. https://www.facebook.com/Clemson-Chemistry-Graduate-Student-Organization-236399156377981

The undergraduate ACS affiliates group has also been active, with outreach activities at local schools and several members attending and presenting their research at the Southeast Regional American Chemical Society meeting in Columbia in October 2016.  Their chapter advisor Dr. Elliot Ennis is working with them on more activities for spring 2017.