I’m going to start a blog so that I can communicate with you some of the things currently going on in the department. I hope this will shed more light into some of the issues and happenings around the department. I haven’t yet decided what direction to go and how much of this to make personal or even how often I’ll add an entry. I’m hoping this will evolve organically, not in an alkane or hydrocarbon kind of way, but perhaps more in a neural network kind of way.

As many of you know, George Hague has recently retired as our MSO. We will miss George greatly and his experience and optimism, but he won’t be totally gone. He will still be in the building helping Prof. Gervay-Hague’s research.

We have a new MSO arriving Sept. 2nd. Susan Olton comes to us from Chemical Engineering. She has considerable experience in this position and we hope her large knowledge base, particularly in navigating through the UC administration, will be quite useful. Let’s all welcome Susan!

The fall application deadline for graduate student travel awards is October 15 (covering the timeframe for travel from July 1, 2008 through June 30 2009). Please submit your application to Carol Barnes. The application can be found on the graduate studies website at http://gradstudies.ucdavis.edu/ssupport/internal_travel.html.

Spring application deadline: Applications for travel during January 1 through December 31, 2009 are due to the graduate programs by March 15, 2009.

Contact Carol Barnes for more details.

We are all excited to learn from Dean Ko about our new Chemistry Department Chair, Professor Carlito Lebrilla, who starts in the position July 1, 2008. Excellent!

Congratulations to this year’s R. Bryan Miller Symposium award winners. Sidra Ayub and Evan Horn won the 2008 R. Bryan Miller Undergraduate Award, and Rick Carpenter received the 2008 R. Bryan Miller Graduate Fellowship. Well done!

The 2008 R. Bryan Miller Memorial Symposium will be held on March 7, featuring Professor Peter Dervan as the Plenary Speaker. As a special tribute to mark the 10^th year memorial of Bryan Miller’s passing, the 2008 Miller Symposium will be expanded to include a student poster session and reception on Thursday evening, March 6. To register for the symposium and view the list of speakers, please visit the Miller Symposium website shown above.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Dean Tantillo for receiving the 2007 Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry Award for Early Excellence in Physical Organic Chemistry, and to Assistant Professor Delmar Larsen for his new Human Frontiers of Science Program grant “Reengineering Nature: Directed protein design of the key dynamics in novel Rhodopsin Protein Mimics”. Also, Professor Larsen just won the prestigious Newport Corporation “MountMania” contest for the highest density of optical mounts on a laser table!