Seniors Elected to Phi Beta Kappa

Five senior chemistry majors have been elected to the Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.  They will be honored at an induction ceremony on Saturday, May 26, 2018 at 4:00 p.m. in the Chapel.  The honorees are:

  • Max Distler
  • Kenneth (Cody) Hecht
  • Joanna Korpanty
  • Carlo Medina
  • Daniel Robertson

They join Maya Marshall and Aaron Stone, who were elected in the fall semester.  This has been a banner year for chemistry students and we proudly extend our congratulations to all.

Personick group presentations at ACS meeting

Members of the Personick research group (left to right: David Solti ’18, Melissa King (grad), Prof. Personick, and Danny Robertson ’18) attended the American Chemical Society Spring National Meeting in New Orleans, LA from March 18-22, 2018. Danny gave a talk on Sunday on “(Ag)Au concave cubes as experimental models of computationally predicted active sites for the oxygen-assisted coupling of alcohols.” Melissa presented on Wednesday about her work on “Coupling competitive surface interactions: a synthetic route to enhanced grain boundaries at the exterior of multiply twinned palladium nanoparticles.” On Thursday, Prof. Personick presented the group’s recently published research regarding “Approaches for bridging dissimilar reduction kinetics in the synthesis of bimetallic nanomaterials.” All of the talks were well received by their respective audiences.

In addition to presenting their research, the Wesleyan contingent also recruited prospective graduate students for the Wesleyan PhD program at the graduate school recruiting fair, and Melissa was invited to participate in a panel on “Graduate School: The In’s and Out’s of Getting In” which was very highly attended. Prof. Personick caught up with Wesleyan alum Prof. John Keith (Univ. of Pittsburgh) over breakfast, and everyone spent time sampling the local cuisine.