Calendar

On Thursday, May 2nd, Willard Middle School will host Family Science Night, an evening of colorful demonstrations and hands-on chemistry, presented by the local California Section of the American Chemical Society.  The entire Willard Community is cordially invited!

Join us at 6 PM in the Multi Purpose Room for exciting chemical demonstrations. We’re celebrating Earth Week this year with theme, “Getting A Charge Out Of Chemistry,” and visitors will have the chance to recreate Alessandro Volta’s original 1799 voltaic pile.  Pick up your event program and visit each of the activity stations for plenty of hands-on science, before returning to the MPR for prizes and Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream.   Collect your souvenir Periodic Table and copies of Celebrating Chemistry, with instructions for a variety of safe, hands-on activities that you can try at home.

Please contact Michael Cheng if you would like to join our volunteer team and help out at this event!

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.

Cal ACS invites you to join us for a unique tour of LBNL’s Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit (ABPDU) in Emeryville, CA.  Program Manager James Gardner, Senior Process Engineer Dupeng Liu, and their colleagues will introduce us to this cutting-edge facility, which works with other laboratories and companies to develop the next generation of sustainable manufacturing processes. You will hear from experts about continuous bioprocessing, purification methods, and more.

We will meet at Summer Summer Thai Eatery (5885 Hollis St #50, Emeryville CA 94608), at 5 PM for drinks and a buffet dinner.  Tour groups will leave at 5:30, 6:00, and 6:30 PM to visit the ABPDU facility next door.  It is essential that you reserve for your preferred tour time, because this is a Federal facility and you must provide your name and country of citizenship in advance.  The tour is free but Cal ACS is charging for this event to help cover the restaurant rental and food costs: $30 for professional members and $15 for students or unemployed members.  Please use this link to register for this event. Deadline for reservations: Friday, May 3rd.

Since ABPDU is a working process development facility, visitors are required to wear CLOSE-TOED shoes.  Sandals are not permitted.  Other personal protective equipment (face goggles) will be provided onsite.

Note: if you show up without a reservation, you are welcome to join us for the buffet dinner and networking, but it will not be possible to accommodate you on the tour.