Calendar

Apr
20
Sat
2024
Earth Day at the John Muir Historical Site
Apr 20 @ 10:00 am – 4:00 pm

John Muir Association logo

Celebrating John Muir’s 186th birthday
and the 54rd Anniversary of Earth Day

Cal ACS will be there with hands-on chemistry, featuring the 2024 Earth Week theme,

Get a Charge out of Chemistry
Recárgate con la Química

The California Section will join numerous other community and educational organizations for the return of this Earth Day celebration to Martinez.  Look for the Cal ACS canopy, where visitors will discover how to build a battery like the one Alessandro Volta invented in 1799.  They can also try splitting water by electrolysis, using electricity from photovoltaic panels.  And, they can make their own UV light-detecting bracelet using photochromic beads.

If you can help out at the ACS booth, please contact Sushila Kanodia.  See you there!

Apr
22
Mon
2024
Professor Jennifer Doudna: “How Bacteria Taught Us to Cure Genetic Disease”
Apr 22 @ 12:00 pm – 2:30 pm
May
4
Sat
2024
Got Fakes? Paper microfluidics and the hunt for bad quality medicines
May 4 @ 10:30 am – 12:00 pm

Marya Lieberman, PhD

Our Distinguished Speaker

Abstract

In low- and middle-income countries, about one in ten medicine products is substandard or falsified. In my lab, I have samples of antimalarial drugs made from starch and chalk, antibiotics “cut” with talcum powder, and chemotherapy drugs that were manufactured at half the concentration they should have been. How do these products get into the supply chain, and more importantly, how can chemists help to get them out? This talk will focus on a point-of-use testing device that my group invented twelve years ago, the paper analytical device or PAD. I’ll explain how this paper microfluidic device works and how we are implementing it with partners in sub-Saharan Africa to discover bad quality medicines.

About The Speaker

Dr. Marya Lieberman enjoys making stained glass, cooking, and solving fiendish cryptic crosswords. She loves chemistry so much she did a chemistry demonstration at her wedding. As a kid in Berkeley, California, she missed all the exciting stuff in the 60’s and 70’s, although her mother tells her she was gassed in her stroller. She developed an interest in science that was deepened and focused by an undergraduate degree in chemistry at MIT and a PhD from the University of Washington, Seattle, where she designed and built an artificial metalloprotein. A high point in this project was finally understanding her protein’s energy landscape; a low point was sleeping on the floor of the lab during the marathon HPLC kinetics runs required to get to the energy landscape. She received a prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship to study at Caltech, where she discovered that the NSF had not considered that Fellows might get pregnant and had no maternity leave policy. After the birth of her first child, she and her husband became faculty members at the University of Notre Dame, where they have happily occupied neighboring offices for 28 years. Her second child was born the day before she received tenure. For most of her career, she studied DNA nanostructures and cool molecular electronics with high-vacuum instrumentation and scanning probe microscopes. She took pictures of single molecules sitting on surfaces, knitted DNA into tiny carpets, and studied quantum-dot cellular automata. In 2012, she started a new research program using paper microfluidics to develop technologies for use in low resource settings. For the past 12 years, she has been on the hunt for substandard and falsified medicines with collaborators in Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Palestine, and Bangladesh. This work received coverage by numerous news outlets, including Bloomberg News, Chemical and Engineering News, the Voice of America, and BBC Worldwide.

Zoom link to be shared with attendees the day of the event.

Please register before Thursday, May 2, 2024, 12 noon. Your email address is needed to send the Zoom link, which will be shared with attendees on or before the day of the event via Brown Paper Tickets.

Please visit the CalACS website www.calacs.org to register for this meeting or use Brown Paper Tickets.

The event is FREE and open to the community. More information: e-mail WCC co-chair Elaine Yamaguchi.