American Chemical Society
Division of Physical Chemistry
Fall 2007 Newslette

• Officers
• Remarks from Chair
• Election Information and Ballot
• Notes from the Secretary
• Councilor's Report
• Biophysical Subdivision
• Theoretical Subdivision
• Poster Session Awards
• Request for Symposia Topics and Speakers
• Recent Symposia Topics
• Spring 2008 Meeting, Technical Program, April 6-10, 2008 New Orleans, LA
• Fall 2007 Meeting, Call for Papers, August 17-21, 2008 Philadelphia, PA
• Restrictions for Speakers for PHYS Symposia
• Submission of Abstracts
• General Information for Contributed Papers
• Future ACS Meetings
• Information and Rules Applying to All Contributed Poster Papers
• Membership Information
• Membership Application

Remarks from the Division Chair
Fall, 2007

Bruce D. Kay

Greeting from the Chair! The recent ACS meeting in Boston was a huge success for the PHYS Division. Outgoing Program Chair and new Division Chair Greg Voth organized an outstanding meeting consisting of eight symposia spanning a broad range of topics. The topics were: Biological Ion Channels: From Molecular Structure to Cellular Function; Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Imaging and Manipulation of Biomolecular Systems; Structural Determination, Refinement, and Modeling of Large Biomolecular Complexes; Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics: Can One Avoid the Other?; Computational Electrochemistry for New Energy; Hydration: From Clusters to Aqueous Solution; Excited Electronic States in Chemistry and Biology: Theory and Experiment; Emergence of Function in Molecular Assembly. Over 700 papers were presented in the PHYS Division and the attendance was overflowing in many sessions. Thanks, Greg, for putting together a fantastic program!

The Physical Chemistry Division also gives awards for the best student posters at each meeting. The awardees for the Fall 2007 meeting in Boston are given later in this newsletter and their pictures can be found on the web. (http://hackberry.chem.trinity.edu/PHYS/PosterAwardWinnersF07.html)

The 2008 Spring National ACS Meeting in New Orleans is coming up April 6-10, and I look forward to seeing many of you at the outstanding program that incoming Program Chair Laurie Butler has put together. Symposium topics will include: Physical Chemistry of Atmospheric Processes; Computational Spectroscopy; Emergence of Function in Molecular Assemblies; Nanostructured Materials; Multiscale Modeling in Biophysics; Electronic Structure and Reaction Dynamics of Open–Shell Species; and, Spectroscopy, Chemistry and Imaging through Nanophotonics. I encourage you all to contribute papers to these symposia. OASYS ( http://oasys.acs.org/ ) is currently open for abstract submission and will close for the PHYS Division on October 28, 2008. The Spring meeting is also the time when we honor our colleagues who have won National ACS Awards. The 2008 award winners will be announced in an upcoming edition of the newsletter.

The PHYS Division functions because of the excellent volunteers within the division. I would like to invite all Physical Division members to become more active in the Division, as officers, executive committee members, or as symposium organizers. If you are interested in being an officer or being on the Executive Committee, please contact me and I will forward your name to the Nominating Committee. If you would like to organize a symposium, Martin Head-Gordon (mhg@bastillee.cchem.berkeley.edu) is the Program Chair for 2009 and Mark Johnson (mark.johnson@yale.edu) is Program Chair for 2010.

I would like to thank all the officers and staff of the Physical Division for their unwavering dedication and hard work. The past two Chairs, Barbara Garrison and David Nesbitt provided endless advice, help, and encouragement that has made my job much easier. Our Secretary/Treasurer, Anne McCoy, and her assistant, Betsy Foran, worked tirelessly and their efforts have been essential to the smooth running of the Division.

Finally, I just want to say that it has been an honor to serve as the Chair of the PHYS Division this past year. We can all take great pride in the health, vitality, and scientific diversity of physical chemistry. Let's keep up the good work! I hope that you will take the opportunity to let me know of any ways in which you think that the Physical Chemistry Division can better serve its membership and help contribute to our field.

Election Information and Ballot

Dear PHYS Division Member:

The Bylaws of the Division of Physical Chemistry, approved in 2006, call for the Division Chair to appoint a three-person, Nominating Committee before the spring meeting. A complete slate of candidates prepared by this committee will consist of one candidate for Vice-Chair-Elect, one candidate for each vacancy on the Executive Committee, and one candidate for each vacancy that may have developed in the ranks of the division Councilors, Alternate Councilors, and Secretary/Treasurer position. The Vice-Chair-Elect automatically becomes the Vice-Chair, Chair-Elect, Chair, and Immediate past-Chair in each succeeding year. Thus, this person makes a commitment to serve five years on the Executive Committee. In the year this person serves as Chair-Elect, the duties of Program Chair are also his or hers. The term of office for other Executive Committee members, Councilors, and Alternate Councilors is three years. The Secretary/Treasurer serves five years.

The Secretary/Treasurer is required to announce the slate of candidates in the fall newsletter.

To increase the input of the members in this nominating process and to broaden the pool of candidates, the Executive Committee seeks input directly from members for use by the Nominating Committee. Any member may suggest nominees to any of the officers of the PHYS division in writing. The nominee must agree to serve.

Additional nominations can come from the membership in the following fashion: A petition candidate must be supported by the signatures of not fewer than 4% of the members of the PHYS division in good standing (presently approximately 4,000). No signature shall be valid if it appears on more than one nominating petition for the same vacancy during the same calendar year.

A letter shall be submitted from each petition nominee stating willingness to be a candidate for election and to serve the Division for a full term if elected. No nominee may be a candidate for more than one vacancy. If nominated for more than one vacancy, the nominee must choose which nomination to accept.

Four weeks from the date of the mailing of the fall newsletter shall be allowed for additional nominations to be received by the Secretary/Treasurer. All valid nominations received within that period shall be accepted and no others.

If no valid nominations are forthcoming from the membership, the nominees submitted by the Nominating Committee for Vice-Chair-Elect and membership on the Executive Committee are declared elected.

Regardless of whether petition nominees are validated or not, the Bylaws require the Secretary/Treasurer to distribute to every PHYS division member a ballot that bears at a minimum the names and biographical sketches of the single candidates for each Councilor and Alternate Councilor vacancy submitted by the Nominating Committee.

Biographical sketches of all the nominees are found below. This year, the Nominating Committee consisted of Barbara Garrison, Bruce Kay, and Geri Richmond. They have chosen the following candidates for election:

Mark A. Johnson, Received his B. S. degree from The University of California, Berkeley, in 1977, where he worked for several years on the photochemistry of DNA adducts in the laboratories of Prof. C. Bradley Moore. He then studied under Prof. Richard N. Zare at Stanford University where he applied laser population labeling schemes in the application of high resolution spectroscopy to reaction dynamics, earning a Ph. D. in Chemistry in 1983. His interests turned to cluster ion spectroscopy in his postdoctoral work with Prof. W. Carl Lineberger from 1983 to 1985, during which he played a key role in the development of widely used “ion bunching” techniques for size-selected cluster ion studies that match pulsed supersonic ion sources with broadly tunable pulsed lasers. He then began independent work as an Assistant Professor at Yale University, where he rose through the ranks to his present position as the Arthur T. Kemp Professor of Chemistry. There he introduced pulsed time-of-flight techniques for anion photoelectron spectroscopy and more recently has applied tunable solid state lasers to obtain the uv/vis/ir spectra of size-selected ion-solvent clusters. His current research themes (http://www.yale.edu/jlab/) largely involve exploiting molecular clusters as model systems with which to expose fundamental, molecular level paradigms underlying condensed phase behavior. Particular emphasis is placed on pure and doped water clusters, especially hydrated electrons and protons, that are explored with broadly tunable infrared radiation in conjunction with negative ion photoelectron spectroscopy. A speciality in this regard is the implementation of argon cluster-mediated synthesis and “messenger” spectroscopy of trapped intermediates in chemical reactions.

His teaching and research activities have been acknowledged by many awards and honors, including the Yale College Dylan Hixon Award for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences (2007) and the APS Plyler Prize (2006) as well as his designation as an NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1987), Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar and Distinguished New Investigator. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society (DLS, 1999) and the AAAS (2005). He also participates widely in the professional societies at the national level, where he is presently Chair Elect of the APS Division of Laser Science (2007) and an Executive Committee member of the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry (2006-8).  He has been on the selection committees for several national awards including the APS Plyler Prize (2001-2003) and Langmuir Award. He has been a Distinguished Visitor, J.I.L.A. (2005) and serves as Advisory Editor to Chemical Physics Letters (2004-), J. Phys. Chem. A (2006-), and Molecular Physics (2006-). He as served a Chair for two Gordon Research Conferences (Photoions (2001) and Molecular and Ionic Clusters (1996)). He has also been acknowledged internationally as a J.S.P.S. Fellow (2001) and Visiting Professor at the University of Paris-Nord (1998) and –Sud (Orsay, 1989, 1995). He is presently a member of the American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has graduated 16 Ph. D. students over the past 22 years, and is presently overseeing a research group of 8 students and postdocs. His research work has appeared in over 140 refereed publications as well as several reviews (Ann. Rev. Phys. Chem., Adv. Chemical Physics, Accounts of Chemical Research, etc.), and he has given over 200 invited lectures, including the Condon Lecture at C.U. Boulder in 2005.

Paul W. Jagodzinski,received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (1973) and the Ph.D. degree in Physical Chemistry from Texas A&M University (1979). At Texas A&M he worked with Jaan Laane on the vibrational spectroscopy of large-amplitude, low-frequency normal modes. Jagodzinski was a postdoctoral fellow with Warner Peticolas at the University of Oregon (1979-1981) where he used resonance Raman spectroscopy to study enzyme-substrate intermediate complexes. He spent one year as an Assistant Professor at Eastern Michigan University before moving to West Virginia University where he attained the rank of Professor. He served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry at WVU from 1990 until 2001. In 2001 he moved to the Department of Chemistry & Geochemistry at the Colorado School of Mines as Professor and Head of the Department where he served as Head until 2006. He has received Outstanding Faculty Awards at both WVU and the School of Mines. Jagodzinski’s current work involves understanding the effects of quantum confinement as manifest in adsorbate-surface interactions and chemistry using plasmon-enhanced spectroscopy. He has mentored 6 postdoctoral fellows and 20 graduate students in his career. Jagodzinski is involved with programs to increase opportunities for traditionally under-represented groups in the sciences and engineering and has been recognized for those efforts. He is a member of the American Chemical Society and the Society for Applied Spectroscopy. Within the ACS he has served as Councilor for the Northern West Virginia Section (1986-2001) and also Chair of that Section. He serves as Alternate Councilor for the Colorado Section (2005-present) and also was Chair of that Section. Jagodzinski has served on the Women Chemists Committee (member, 1988-1992), Meetings and Exposition Committee (member, 1997-2001; Vice Chair, 2001; Finance Subcommittee Chair, 1999-2001), Budget and Finance Committee (member, 2001-present; member, Advisory Subcommittee, 2007-present; Subcommittee on Financial Impacts of Constitutional Amendments member, 2006-present, Chair 2007-present), Task Force on National Meeting Finances (member, 2002-2003), and the Program Review Advisory Group (member, 2006-present).

Veronica Vaida received her B.Sc. degree (1973) in chemistry at Brown University having started her studies at the University of Bucharest, Romania. She completed a M.Sc. (1975) and Ph.D. (1977) degree at Yale University where she used the tools of spectroscopy to investigate energy transfer in molecular crystals. In 1977 Dr. Vaida went to Harvard University, first as a Xerox post-doctoral fellow, then as an assistant and associate professor in chemistry. At Harvard she developed spectroscopic methods for the study of reactive molecules and used these methods to probe photochemistry of transition metal complexes, polyenes and small polyatomic molecules (NH₃, CS₂, etc.). In 1984 Prof. Vaida moved to the University of Colorado, Boulder as an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry where she received tenure in 1987 and was promoted to Full Professor in 1990. She served as Chair of her Department from 2002 to 2006. Her teaching and her research have followed an interdisciplinary path at the interface of physical chemistry and atmospheric science. In addition to her faculty appointment in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Prof. Vaida served on the faculty of PAOS (Program in Atmospheric and Oceanographic Sciences), the Environmental Studies Program and has been a fellow of CIRES (Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences) since 2000. Prof. Vaida was a major contributor to the development of a graduate program in atmospheric chemistry. Her research at the University of Colorado focused on light-initiated reactions of molecules and radicals of atmospheric interest (OClO, H₂SO₄, organic acids and alcohols, etc.). She developed methods for the study of water by investigating water clusters (hydrates), water-air interfaces and aerosols to provide the fundamental data base needed to establish the role of chemistry in aqueous environments in atmospheric chemistry and climate. Veronica Vaida has been a fellow of the Sloan Foundation (1980), the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher Scholar (1984), Erskine (University of Canterbury, New Zealand 1994), Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard (2004-2006), AAAS since 2004, APS since 2004 and is a Sigman Xi Distinguished Lecturer for 2007-2008.

Gang-yu Liu completed B.Sc. (1985) at Peking University (PR China) before coming to the U.S. to obtain her M.A. (1988) in biophysics, and Ph.D. (1992) in physical chemistry at Princeton University, working with Giacinto Scoles on molecular beam scattering from inorganic surfaces and organic monolayers. From 1992-1994 Liu was a recipient of a Miller Research Fellowship working at Lawrence Berkeley National laboratory with Miquel Salmeron and Y. T. Lee.  She utilized scanning probe microscopy for the investigation of surface chemical reactions and physical properties. From 1994-2000, Liu had been a faculty member at Wayne State University, Chemistry Department. She constructed state-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFM) and scanning tunneling microscopes (STM), and applied scanning probe techniques for nanofabrication of various of materials. Liu and her team have invented an advanced nanofabrication technique known as nanografting in 1997. In 2001, Liu moved to University of California, Davis, and became a faculty member at Chemistry Department in association with biophysical graduate group as well as the organized research unit (ORU) of Nanomaterials for Environment, Agriculture and Technology (NEAT). Liu is known to apply nanotechnology to solve chemistry and biochemistry problems that are otherwise difficult to probe, such as size-dependent surface chemical reactions and cellular signaling processes triggered by nanostructures of ligands mimicking extracellular matrices. Liu has received awards that include a CGP Fellowship (1986), a Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship (190-1991), and a Miller Research Fellowship (1992-1994), a Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty (1994-1999) and an Arnold and Mable Beckman Young Investigator Award (1996-1998). She is a Senior Editor of Journal of Physical Chemistry, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Langmuir, ACS Nano, and Nanobiotechnology. Liu has over 70 scientific publications and over 100 invited talks.

Vicki H. Grassian< received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the State University of New York-Albany (1981), a M.S. degree in Chemistry (1982) and a Ph.D. degree in Chemsitry (1987) from University of California-Berkeley with George C. Pimentel. Following postdoctoral positions, she began her independent academic career at the University of Iowa as an Assistant Professor in 1990. Vicki H. Grassian is currently a full professor in the Department of Chemistry and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering. She was just recently appointed as the Director of the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Institute at the University of Iowa. Grassian and her group have pioneered experimental studies investigating how aerosol particles in the atmosphere affect its chemical composition., and data from her lab are being used in atmospheric chemistry models. Her current research interests are in the areas of heterogeneous atmospheric chemistry, climate impact of atmospheric aerosols, environmental molecular surface science and environmental and health aspects of nanoscience and nanotechnology. She has over 140 peer-reviewed publications and is the editor of two books. The most recent entitled Environmental Catalysis published by CRC Press in 2005. At the University of Iowa, Professor Grassian has been the recipient of a Faculty Scholar Award (1999-2001) a Distinguished Achievement Award (2002), a James Van Allen Natural Sciences Faculty Fellowship (2004), the Regents Award for Faculty Excellence (2006) and was recently named a Collegiate Fellow in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (2007). In 2003, she received an NSF Creativity Award and in 2005, she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Surface Science Divsion of AVS, the Publication Committee of AAAR, the Users Advisory Committee of the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at PNNL and is a member of the editorial advisory board for the Journal of Physical Chemistry.

C. David Sherrill eceived his B.S. in Chemistry from MIT in 1992 and his Ph.D. in computational quantum chemistry in 1996, working as an NSF graduate fellow in the laboratory of Fritz Schaefer at the University of Georgia. As an NSF postdoctoral fellow, he worked with the group of Martin Head-Gordon at the University of California, Berkeley. Since 1999, Sherrill has been on the faculty of the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2006, he has held a joint appointment with the Computational Science and Engineering division of the College of Computing. He serves as co-director of the Center for Computational Molecular Science and Technology. His interests include the development of new electronic structure models and their application to highly reactive species, bond-breaking reactions, excited electronic states, and fundamental forces of molecular recognition.  He has published over 70 peer-reviewed articles on these topics.  Dr. Sherrill has received a Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (1999), the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2001), an NSF CAREER Award (2001), and the W. Howard Ector Outstanding Teacher Award (2006). He served as chair of the Georgia Section of the American Chemical Society in 2006, and he joined the editorial board of the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry in 2007.

Marsha I. Lester Born, 1955. B.A. Douglass College, Rutgers University (1976), Ph.D. Columbia University (1981), National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, Bell Laboratories (1981-82), University of Pennsylvania, Assistant Professor (1982-88), Associate Professor (1988-92), Professor of Chemistry (1992-present), Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Natural Sciences (2003-present), and Chair, Department of Chemistry (2005-08).

Camille and Henry Dreyfus Young Faculty Award (1982) and Teacher-Scholar Award (1986), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (1987), National Science Foundation Career Advancement Award (1988), Broida Prize awarded by the International Symposium on Free Radicals (1995), Fellow of the American Physical Society (1993) and American Association for the Advancement of Science (1997), Guggenheim Fellowship (2002-03), Visiting Miller Research Professor, Berkeley (2003), Distinguished Traveling Lecturer, Division of Laser Science, American Physical Society (2002-06), Bourke Lectureship, Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2005).

Recent professional activities: Chair, Chair-Elect, Vice-Chair, and Past-Chair, Division of Laser Science, American Physical Society (1998-2002), Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (1998-2002) and Chair, Council for Chemical Sciences (2004-07), Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics, and Applications, National Research Council (1996-2001), Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Area Coordinator, Pacifichem 2000, sponsored by the American Chemical Society (2000), International Advisory Committee, International Symposium on Molecular Spectroscopy (2005-07), American Association for the Advancement of Science, Section Committee on Chemistry, Member-at-Large (2004-08). She has previously served as an Alternate Councilor for the Physical Division of the ACS (2002-04).

Her current research employs a variety of novel laser spectroscopic methods to investigate the dynamics of free radicals in encounters with reactive molecular partners of atmospheric and combustion relevance. She is the coauthor of more than 100 publications in physical chemistry. She has served on the editorial advisory boards of Chemical Physics Letters (1997-present), Molecular Physics (1998-2000), Journal of Chemical Physics (2007-09), and the Journal of Physical Chemistry (1995-2000, 2005-07).

Notes from the Secretary/Treasurer

Anne B. McCoy

This newsletter contains information about the ACS national meetings and any other items of interest to significant numbers of PHYS Division members. All members of the PHYS Division are welcome to submit items to the Secretary for inclusion in this newsletter. The deadlines are generally around December 1 and May 1 for the newsletters appearing before the Spring and Fall ACS meetings, respectively. Submissions may be made via mail, FAX, or e-mail.

The current ACS Bylaws & Regulations may be viewed at:

http://www.chemistry.org/portal/Chemistry?PID=acsdisplay.html&DOC=committees%5Ccnb%5Cindex.html.

Click on the link to Documents of the Committee and then on the link to Charter, Constitution, Bylaws, and Regulations of the American Chemical Society (Bulletin 5).

A copy of the bylaws and regulations is also included on the Division’s web page (http://hackberry.chem.trinity.edu/PHYS.)

Councilor’s Report

John E. Adams

I will not attempt to summarize everything that came before the ACS Council at its most recent meeting in Boston because some of those items are not likely to be of general interest.  If any members of PHYS would like additional information or clarification, however, I would be pleased to elaborate further and answer any questions that I can.

We began with balloting for members of the elected committees (Council Policy Committee, Committee on Nominations and Elections, and the Committee on Committees). Those particular elections may not be of much interest to most of you reading this report, but I do want to call your attention to upcoming elections in which I hope you WILL take an interest.

• ACS President-Elect: The candidates this fall are Thomas Lane (Dow Corning) and Howard Peters (Peters, Verny, LLP). Please take time to cast your vote for one of these individuals when the ballots become available this fall.
• If you live in District II, you will be choosing between Joseph Peterson (U. of Tennessee, retired) and Diane Grob Schmidt (Proctor and Gamble; the incumbent) this fall to be your District Director.
• If you live in District IV, you will be choosing between Eric Bigham (GlaxoSmithKline; the incumbent) and Greg Robinson (U. of Georgia) this fall to be your District Director.

The fact of the matter is that too few members participate in these elections. Whom you select really CAN make a difference. The ultimate power to determine the direction of ACS rests with the Board of Directors, so please exercise your privilege to decide who will be wielding that power. Those of us who are members of the Council will also be choosing two Directors-at-Large from a slate of four candidates.

There was a petition on the floor for a vote at this meeting that would make a minor, essentially housekeeping, change in the Society Bylaws. The issue at hand had to do with oversight by the Committee on Local Section Activities of Local Section affiliations with other technical organizations. Yeah, the topic was just as dull and insignificant as it sounds, and the petition was approved overwhelmingly. Of more interest, though, was what is on tap for New Orleans next spring. At that time, Council will be voting on a very long petition that would (1) change the basic qualifications for membership, (2) eliminate the Associate Member category (current Associate Members would be eligible immediately for full membership), and (3) create a new category of Student Members. Currently, ACS Student Affiliates are NOT members of the Society, no matter what the confusing and somewhat deceptive wording used by the Membership Division on the ACS web site actually says. The proposed changes would enable undergraduates to join the Society with most of the privileges of regular membership. (Lest you be concerned, they certainly WOULD get a substantial dues break. The proposal would not dissolve the existing Student Affiliate chapters, although there may be some changes in what we call these groups.)  The real sticking point with some folks is the provision permitting the Student Members to vote in national elections. There were two other petitions being previewed for action in New Orleans, one on preferential balloting in national elections and another on Local Section election procedures.  The language of the first of these petitions is currently being reworked by the Committee on Constitution and Bylaws to clarify the procedure, while the second petition was found to contain significant flaws (such as outright violations of the ACS Constitution) and will be (or has been) withdrawn.

Attendance at the Boston meeting (15,344 as of 8/21) was somewhat better than expected. Lack of hotel rooms in the immediate vicinity of the Convention Center caused some problems for folks, but I am told that there are supposed to be two additional large hotels in that area by the time we go back to Boston. Due to negative reactions from attendees at the Spring 2007 meeting in Chicago, the National Meeting in 2011 will be moved from Chicago to Denver. We also learned that renovations to the convention center in New York will not be complete in time for the scheduled 2012 meeting, so that meeting will be moved to Philadelphia. In other news about national meetings, it was announced that the abstracts of any papers that are withdrawn will henceforth be eliminated from the CAS database. There is also a growing sentiment to remove the abstracts of “no-shows”.

ACS membership is up this year and the number of those who are delinquent in their dues payments is down. While I often hear ACS members say that membership is dropping because dues have gotten too high, the data has never substantiated that conclusion. And speaking of finances, the Society at mid-year was running right on budget.

Finally, I note three items that may be of interest.

• The new version of the ACS web site is scheduled for rollout on September 30. Any of you who have tried to find useful information on the old version of the site know that you essentially have to know the answer already in order to know where to look. Not good. The preview of the new site suggests that this new version will be a big improvement over what we have had in the past.
• Over the last several years, ACS has created several leadership development courses, all of which will be available in some form free of charge to ACS members by year end. These courses, while using ACS service as an example, are designed to be of general use as part of career development. Information about these courses will be available on the new web site.
• The Society Committee on Budget and Finance and the Board of Directors approved a 2008-2010 funding request for a State Government Affairs Program. This program will focus on getting ACS and ACS members more involved in issues at the local level. The pilot project will involve five states and will focus on the issue of K-12 education.

Theoretical Subdivision

Angel Garcia

Subdivision membership is free to dues-paying members or affiliates of the Division of Physical Chemistry. To join the Theoretical Subdivision, notify the Chair, Angel Garcia, at the address in the table of officers. Indicate that you wish to join and mention that you belong to the PHYS Division. If you do not belong to the Division, you may join both the Division and the Theoretical Subdivision by completing the application form at the end of this newsletter.

Student Poster Awards

Gregory Voth

The winners of the Physical Chemistry Student Poster Award Competition at the Fall 2007 ACS meeting in Boston, MA, were:

Nina Schwalb, Institut für Physikalische Chemie, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, "Ultrafast nonradiative deactivation dynamics of electronically excited nucleobases: Resolution of the gas vs. solution phase mystery"

Matthew Rossi, Department of Chemistry, Drexel University, "Predictions of Hole Mobilities in Organic Nanoscale Data Storage Materials"

Beth A. Lindquist, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Notre Dame University "Nitrile Groups as Vibrational Probes of Protein Structure and Dynamics: Calculations of the C?N Vibrational Line Shape"

Gene-Wei Li, Department of Physics, Harvard University "Probing Transcription Factor Dynamics at the Single Molecule Level in a Living Cell"

Albert DeFusco III, Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh "Electron Attachment to Large Water Clusters"

Leigh Foster and Katharyn Fletcher, Department of Chemistry, Mount Holyoke College, "Effect of dopant on perovskite proton conduction pathways"

Congratulations to the presenters of these excellent posters! Each winner received $300 and a signed award certificate. The Physical Chemistry Division thanks the many other people who entered the competition and also the anonymous and impartial judges.

Request for Symposia Topics and Speakers

Martin Head-Gordon

The Executive Committee solicits formal suggestions for symposia and speakers for the meetings to be held in future years. The Executive Committee will meet in New Orleans, LA in March, 2008, to plan the programs for 2010. Please send your suggestions to the 2009 Program Chair, Martin Head-Gordon, at the address in the table of officers. The deadline for receipt of suggestions is November 1, 2008. These suggestions will be essential input for organizing the programs of the meetings. For greatest effectiveness, follow these guidelines:

• a) Recommend a symposium topic, organizer, and list of suggested speakers (a list of recent PHYS symposia follows for informational purposes).
• b) Provide a brief description of the significance of the symposium.

Recent Symposia Topics

Fall 2008 Meeting
Call for Papers
August 17-21, 2008 Philadelphia, PA

Program Chair: Laurie J. Butler, University of Chicago, Department of Chemistry, Chicago, IL 60637, L-Butler@chicago.edu

Online abstract submission for this meeting opens in January or February, 2008. Please see http://oasys.acs.org/ for abstract submission access and guidelines. Only electronic abstracts via the ACS online submittal system, OASYS, will be accepted, except by special arrangement with the ACS symposium organizers. You can check the Division’s website for specific deadlines. The web page is http://hackberry.chem.trinity.edu/PHYS.

Submit your abstract online at the ACS website: http://oasys.acs.org/. Please see the following for more information regarding submission.  As is now customary, Program Chair Butler has arranged for the presentation of contributed talks in each of the topical symposia. The contributed talks will be selected by the individual symposium organizers from among abstracts that explicitly request consideration for oral presentation. The criterion for selection will be close connection with the topics addressed in the symposia. Abstracts not selected for oral presentation will be assigned to the poster session(s), unless the authors request otherwise. Since the organizers will not be able to accommodate all requests, the poster sessions will be specifically organized to group posters by symposium topic. While the symposia do cover a wide range of topics, they cannot cover the full depth and breadth of physical chemistry.  The Division, therefore, also welcomes general contributions to the poster sessions, which will be grouped by subject area.

The planned symposia and their organizers are:

Fundamental Advances in Contemporary NMR Spectroscopy, Mei Hong (Iowa State) and Lucio Frydman (Weizmann Institute)

Water Mediated Interactions, Dor Ben-Amotz (Purdue) and Hank Ashbaugh (Chemical Engineering, Tulane)

Protein Folding Dynamics: Experiment and Theory, Feng Gai (Penn) and Angel Garcia (Rensaleer)

Spectroscopic Probes of Chemical Dynamics in Gaseous and Condensed Phase, Mark Johnson (Yale) and Steve Corcelli (Notre Dame)

Advances in the Electronic Structure of Transition Metal Systems and , Mu-Hyun Baik (Indiana) and Christopher Cramer (Minnesota)

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