The first set of news is, of course, our Election Returns:
You were probably holding your breath for all this, but the Deck Chairs of the Titanic were actually somewhat Rearranged. Due to two of our previous officers going on to bigger and better things, we now have a somewhat new crew. That now means that the following are our 2001 Section Officers
Chair: Dennis McMinn, of Gonzaga University:Mcminn@gonzaga.edu
Chair Elect: Jeff Moore, of Hollister-StierJeff_Moore@hollister-stier.com (watch the underscores and hyphens)
Secretary/Treasurer: Dennis DeMattia, Byte DynamicsDemattia@acm.org
Councilor: Jeff Rahn, of Eastern Washington UniversityJrahn@ewu.edu
So yes, my friends, we have Dennis, Dennis, Jeff and Jeff as our officers this year.
EMAIL:
I have included all of the officer's email addresses, because in this day and age, that is the only civilized way to communicate to your fellow bretheren. Which brings me to a suggestion that JeffM raised - it might be real helpful to our fellow members if somebody (read: the secretary) could email the membership shortly before our meetings, to act as a tickler for the meeting. I will be happy to do this. ACS National gives me the snail mail addresses of everybody in the section (or else you would not be receiving this epistle) and they do give me some email addresses, but a lot of them are bogus, out of date, whatever (404 in the geek lexicon).
So, would everybody who would like an email notification of our events please send me a short email so I can get a correct address for you and build up a mailing list. As noted, I can be found at demattia@acm.org. Note the acM, not acS. The Association for Computing Machinery is somewhat more advanced on helping their membership with email and stuff than the American Chemical Society seems to be.
Next Meeting and Speaker:
Which brings us to the next item of the agenda, our next speaker. The next meeting will be Friday, April 27, at 7PM, in Room 105 in the chemistry building on the Gonzaga campus. I have been cranking out these newsletters for about three years now, and every time I give directions to this place, and every time (from memory) I get it wrong. So lets try it again. First, find Gonzaga (somewhere north of the river, a couple of blocks off Division on Boone or Sharp or someplace). Park on the street near the Chapel (the big thing with two pointy towers) and not on the campus if you don't want to get nailed with a fine. Go around the RIGHT side of the chapel, then around to about the middle of it, and you will find a walkway heading away from same. Take that, and it runs you just about into the chemistry building. Our meeting room is on the entry floor, classroom near the door, across from the Library. We got plenty of room, please y'all come.
It is sort of especially important that we get some people to show up for this session, since our speaker will be Attila E. Pavlath, the ACS Big Kahuna, the President of our whole Society. His talk topic may not be a real barn burner for most of us, but it would be really good to have a nice turnout for the Head Honcho of our Society. We have had a couple of Ex Presidents speaking, and maybe a couple of Almost presidents, but this is the first time I remember seeing the Real Deal. Come out and see the guy you voted for, and make our little section look good to the big brass.
Speaker Detail
Dr. Attila E. Pavlath works at the Western Regional Research Center of the Department of Agriculture, in Albany, California (Not Nu Yawk). I am particularly interested in this, because that was where I had my first job out of College and it is interesting to see that it is still there. It was kind of an old place when I was there 35 years ago. It seems that he and I were there at the same time, but I do not remember him, and I am rather sure he don't remember me.
Attila is a Senior Research Chemist at the Western Regional Research Center of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, California, conducting research on the utilization of agricultural products as chemical resources. He finished his undergraduate and graduate studies in Hungary. First, he was awarded a Diploma in Chemical Engineering at the Technical University of Budapest, then a doctoral degree in chemistry by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Budapest and a Group Leader at the Central Chemical Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He left Hungary in 1956 and was a Research Fellow at McGill University in Montreal, Canada until 1958 when he joined the Western Research Center of Stauffer Chemical Company in Richmond, California as a Senior Group Leader. Since 1967 he is with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Albany, leading various research projects.
His research activities since 1951 earned him international recognition as an expert in a wide variety of scientific areas. He has been involved in
*Fluorine chemistry (35 years),
*Glow discharge chemistry (15 years),
*Agricultural chemistry (20 years),
*Textile chemistry (10 years),
*Energy research (10 years)
[Add those years up, and you get the youngest looking, 100+ year old!!].
He is recognized as one of the early pioneers in fluorine chemistry. He was one of the first few to apply electric glow discharge in organic chemistry. He was one of the leaders of the research for using agricultural products as alternate energy resources. His newest research is the utilization of agricultural products, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins for other than food purposes.
He is an internationally known expert on these fields, where he has more than 100 scientific publications, 25 patents, 3 books and numerous chapters and reports. He has lectured throughout the world at various scientific meetings, universities, and research institutes. He speaks four languages. The American Chemical Society lists him on its tour speaker list with eight topics. In 1976, the ACS California Section gave Attila the Outstanding Contribution to Chemistry Award recognizing his 25 years research in fluorine chemistry. In 1987, he was selected as the Federal Scientist of the Year in California. In 1997 the American Institute of Chemists honored him with the Chemical Pioneer Award.
His activities in the American Chemical Society date back to 1969. He chaired the California Section (twice), the Division of Professional Relations and many of their committees. He was elected three times to the ACS Board of Directors. He is member of various scientific societies and 10 ACS Divisions.
Talk Title:
Edible Coatings on Food, or How To Keep Fruits and Vegetables Fresh after Light Processing
Various fruits and vegetables need to be pared, cored and/or sliced before consumption, but such light processing deprives the commodity of its natural protection against dehydration and discoloration. Such processed agricultural products must be used immediately after processing or protected by refrigeration and/or special atmosphere storage. A new approach has been found to coat fruits and vegetables after processing with an edible film that protects against undesirable changes, keeps the produce fresh, and allows their consumption without the removal of the coating. An emulsion of proteins, carbohydrates, and waxes is used to creates a thin coating on the surface of the processed fruits and vegetables. This coating is tasteless and nearly invisible. When applied to pieces of apple, pear, and zucchini, no dehydration and discoloration were evident for up to five days. The lecture will describe various combinations of the components and pinpoint future directions.
June Meeting:
We expect to have a joint session with the American Society of Quality Engineers, and join them on a plant tour of Hollister-Stier here in Spokane. This will be on June 7th, we think. We may even toss in some Pizza. There will be another (shorter) newsletter on this.
NORM:
And now for another homily on one of our favorite topics, judging from the reader mail anyway, the Upcoming NORM meeting that we will be hosting next year. Jeff Rahn and Joanne Smieja have allowed themselves to be talked into being the Program Chairs for this meeting. That means they have to find somebody to come here and present some papers. Jeff Moore and I are trying to do whatever else is needed. We welcome anybody else who has some time and wants to help out.
For all of you who are in NORM mode right away, the 2001 meeting will be in Seattle in June:
The 56th Northwest Regional Meeting, hosted by the Puget Sound Section, will be held at Seattle University, June 14 -- 17, 2001. Jacqueline Barton, Donald Brownlee, Glenn Crosby, Jae Edmonds and Lura Powell will be keynote speakers for the meeting and for a special public lecture series featuring topics such as, How Molecules Recognize Each Other, Life in the Universe, the Future of Education, Global Warming and Climate Change in the Pacific Northwest, and Technology in the 21st Century. The meeting will also feature seventeen technical symposia, general and poster sessions, and programs for undergraduate students, young chemists, K-12 teachers and college teachers. Symposium topics include astrobiology, atmospheric environmental chemistry, biological chemistry, chemistry and physics of biological membranes, careers in biological chemistry, chemical information, chemistry of wine, nanotechnology and electronic materials, genomics and proteomics, global climate change, Hanford environmental issues, instrumentation in the 21st century, molecular and single-molecule spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, theoretical and computational chemistry, and a special symposium in honor of Y. Pocker. The Washington (State) College Chemistry Teachers Association is co-sponsor of the meeting and will contribute two days of programs for two- and four-year college chemical educators. Workshops are planned on Chemical Information Education, Laboratory Safety, Tie-Dying, several ACS sponsored workshops on teaching resources for K-12 teachers, and a "smorgasbord of activities for teachers." There will be a High School Teacher Award and Women Chemists luncheon with a distinguished panel of professional women chemists. The meeting event will feature a dramatic theatrical presentation on Marie Curie, followed by the locally famous chemical demonstration show, "Herb Bryce and the Wizard." The banquet event will feature a boat trip on Puget Sound to Blake Island, the Tillicum Village Salmon Dinner and Pacific Northwest Native American Show. Submit abstracts by March 16, 2001, to William Reinhardt, Department of Chemistry, University of Washington, Box 351700, Seattle, Washington, 98195; phone (206) 543-0578; email: rein@chem.washington.edu. Electronic submission is preferred using the instructions posted on the meeting web site: http://www.chem.plu.edu/norm. We look forward to your participation in a strong and successful regional meeting season. As always, research advisors are urged to encourage their graduate students and research associates to participate.
I assume that we will all be getting a registration form in the mail. If not, you can probably go to the ACS web site and register there. These guys are going to be a real hard act to follow.
ByLaws
And finally, we have been notified by somebody in the ACS National organization with FAR too much time on his hands that our section Bylaws Committee has not updated the Section bylaws for several years. This helpful individual even sent us some suggestions on how to get our bylaws to be mainstream, with the times, and up to snuff. So, not having a bylaws committee, we the executive board or whatever we are took the Helpful Hints, applied them to the latest revision of the bylaws that we could find (dated 1995) and have started the process to get them blessed.
Step 1 of that process is to present them to the membership. The following three pages are the revised bylaws. If you really want to see the original bylaws, send me an email. At our coming meeting, some one of us will formally present these things for your review and comments. At the next meeting after that, probably the June one, we get to vote on them. However, there is a catch. We need something like 20 members to show up to vote, or I guess we have to keep trying till we get it right. (Their nice little phrase for this is "adjourn to a date".)
So, before you curl up with your cat in your lap for a long spring night's sleep, please give these paradigms of the English language a quick glance and be prepared to argue for your favorite addition or omission at our next meeting.