Recent News and Announcements

October 16, 2009

Our Alumni Lecturer will be Joseph T. Hupp, Professor and Department Chair, Dept. of Chemistry and Materials Research Center, Northwestern University.  His lecture will be at 4:10 p.m. on April 15.


September 26, 2009

Professor Abigail Bickley recently secured funding from the Major Research Instrumentation Program at NSF to build a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) Detection system for her experiments at the NSCL.  The award is for almost $700K.  To achieve this success, Abby needed to assemble a multi-national collaboration between six universities and national laboratories to garner the necessary resources and support.


September 23, 2009

On belhalf of the National Institute of Justice and the Forensic Sciences Foundation, John McIlroy has been approved for funding under the NIJ/FSF Forensic Science Student Research Program.


September 14, 2009

On belhalf of the National Institute of Justice and the Forensic Sciences Foundation, Melissa Bodnar has been approved for funding under the NIJ/FSF Forensic Science Student Research Program.


August 28, 2009

Chemistry faculty members Marcos Dantus, James McCusker, Dana Spence and Greg Swain have received Stimulus Grants for their research.  To read more, click here.


August 26, 2009

The Younger Chemists Committee of the Michigan State University ACS local section won a 2009 ChemLuminary Award for 'Outstanding or Creative Local Section Younger Chemists Committee Event' at the recent 238th ACS National Meeting held in Washington, DC.


August 26, 2009

Nancy Lavrik has been selected as the 2009 recipient of the Clerical Technical Recognition Award established in honor of Thomas and Concettina Gliozzo. In 2001, Dr. Charles and Marjorie Gliozzo established a fund to recognize clerical and technical employees who assist students, faculty, and staff at Michigan State University. The University and HR selection committee was very impressed with her accomplishments, attitude, and the many examples of students, faculty, and other colleagues she has positively impacted throughout her career at Michigan State University.


August 5, 2009

Britt Vanchura won the Journal of Chemical Crystallography Prize for his poster at the American Crystallographic Association annual meeting last week in Toronto. His poster is on the 4th floor outside Mitch Smith's office, along with the nice rosette he received at the banquet.


July 27, 2009

Jeffrey R. Gour, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow working with Professor Piotr Piecuch, attended the 59th Meeting of Nobel Laureates, which was held in Lindau, Germany, from June 28th to July 3rd, 2009. 23 Nobel Laureates and 580 young researchers from 67 countries attended the meeting, which was dedicated this year to chemistry. The US delegation consisted of 74 graduate students, of which Jeff was one of the 13 students sponsored by the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. The other sponsors were the National Science Foundation's Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, the Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and Mars, Incorporated. The Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education handled the necessary arrangements. Jeff was nominated by Professor Piecuch. He was the second graduate student from Professor Piecuch's group to attend the Nobel Laureate Lindau meeting (Dr. Mike McGuire attended the 52nd meeting in 2002) . For more information about the 59th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau and the earlier meetings in the series, please go to http://www.lindau-nobel.de/.


May 28, 2009

A Symposium to Honor Professor Bill Wulff's 60th Birthday, Saturday, May 30, 2009, 8:15 a.m - 5:20 p.m. Room 138 Chemistry Building Michigan State University


April 3, 2009
James Dye has been selected as the MSU Faculty Emeriti Association Outstanding Individual Award for 2009-2010.

March 26, 2009
Xuefei Huang has won the 2009 New Investigator Award from the ACS Carbohydrate Division.

March 18, 2009
On behalf of the FPWA (Faculty Professional Women's Association) Awards Committee, we are pleased to notify you that we have selected Amy Marie Pollock as a recipient of the 2009 FPWA Outstanding Academic Staff Woman Award.

January 19, 2009
The Jan. 19th, 2009 issue of C&E news contains a 'Science and Technology Concentrates' article highlighting some recent work by graduate student Christine Kalcic and co-authors Dr. Tissa Gunaratne, Professor Dan Jones, Professor Marcos Dantus and Assistant Professor Gavin Reid, entitled 'Femtosecond Laser-induced Ionization/Dissociation of Protonated Peptides', to be published as a communication in J. Am. Chem. Soc.

January 12, 2009
On Friday, January 9, the departmental Windows servers will require more
complex passwords than in the past. The new password requirements are:

  • at least 8 characters

  • has not been used as one of your previous 5 passwords

  • does not contain your account name or full name

  • contains at least three of the following four character groups:


    • English uppercase characters (A through Z)

    • English lowercase characters (a through z)

    • Numerals (0 through 9)

    • Non-alphanumeric characters (such as !$#,%)



If your CHEMISTRY domain password does not meet these requirements by
Friday, email and other services will STOP WORKING, and your domain
account may become locked out. To avoid these problems, please change
your password before Friday if it doesn't already meet the requirements
listed above. Your CHEMISTRY domain password is the one you use to
login to mail.chemistry.msu.edu, poohbah, vpn, etc.

You can change your CHEMISTRY domain password here: http://www.chemistry.msu.edu/password

December 19, 2008

A message to TA's regarding Union Dues/Service Fees and the Grievance Resolution process from the Chemistry Graduate Chairperson and the GEU.


December 12, 2008
The U.S. Department of Energy has announced that Michigan State University has been chosen to design and build the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB). The successful proposal was submitted by a team of scientists from MSU?s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory that includes three members of the Chemistry faculty, Professors David J. Morrissey, Paul F. Mantica and Abigail A. Bickley. FRIB will be developed with $550 million in construction funds from DOE over the next ten years. This national user facility will allow scientists from all over the world to address fundamental problems in nuclear science and nuclear astrophysics , and may also lead to new isotope applications for materials science, nuclear medicine and energy. The DOE press release announcing the FRIB decision is available at http://www.energy.gov/news/6794.htm.

December 2, 2008
Professor Piotr Piecuch has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). His Fellowship citation, which will be published in the March 2009 issue of APS News and which can also be found on the Fellowship Page of the APS Home Page, reads as follows: ?For his outstanding contributions to electronic structure and quantum many-body theories, in particular developments in coupled-cluster theory, important advances in understanding molecular properties, chemical reactivities and intermolecular interactions as well as nuclear structure, through discerning use of computational methods.? Election to Fellowship of APS recognizes outstanding contributions to physics and is limited to no more than one half of one percent of the APS membership. The American Physical Society, founded in 1899, is the largest organization of professional physicists in the United States which has about 46,000 members. Some of Professor Piotr Piecuch?s other honors and awards include the University Distinguished Professorship (2007), the S.R. Palit Memorial Lecture at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, India (2007), the Invitation Fellowship of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2005), the QSCP Promising Scientist Prize of Centre de Mecanique Ondulatoire Appliquee (France; 2004), the election to the European Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Humanities (Paris, France; 2003), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2002-2004), the Wiley-International Journal of Quantum Chemistry Young Investigator Award (2000), and two awards from the Polish Chemical Society for Research (1992, 1986).