Last post for the day, I promise! We have a volunteering opportunity coming up which has been of traditional interest to students in our area. The Ithaca ScienCenter hosts an event, Spooky Science, every year in late October, and this year it’s on October 26. Cornell University students often participate by guiding some hands-on activities, like making slime, while Ithaca College students often assist an IC professor in leading some watchable demonstrations. Various calls will be going out looking for volunteers soon, and if you don’t see anything, feel free to get in touch with us directly, and we’ll guide you to those organizing various events.

And even if you don’t have time to volunteer, we heavily encourage you to visit the ScienCenter on October 26 just to visit and see what’s going on!

It’s that time of year, where we recruit some new folks to join our Executive committee! These are the folks who manage the local section budget, guide local section activities, and decide local section priorities. These are really pretty low-effort tasks, according to most of the people doing them, but they do need to be done. The election voting will begin on November 1, and end two weeks later. This year, we have three open positions:

1. Chair Elect – the chair elect serves a 1 year term, then automatically becomes Chair for the next 1 year. The duties of the Chair are to lead meetings, give the occasional speech, and overall guide the Local Section. The Chair is also responsible for writing the annual report, though in practice our local section has the Secretary do that. The Chair Elect assists in these responsibilities, and takes over should the Chair be unable to perform their duties.
2. Secretary – the Secretary is responsible for taking notes, keeping track of meeting minutes, and receiving communications from the ACS and passing those along as needed. In practice, our Secretary also handles the annual report, updates the website and mailing list, and does most of the occasional communication with the local section membership. This is a 2-year term.
3. Counselor – The Counselor is responsible for attending special Counselor-sections of ACS meetings, where ACS policy is discussed and voted on. Counselors are the voice of the local section within the national society, and they vote on issues such as local section borders, division names, etc. The local section pays for them to attend meetings, so failing all else it’s a great way to get to go to more national conferences. The Counselor is not formally a member of the Executive Committee, but our local section gives the Counselor voting rights on the EC. This position has a 3-year term.
4. Alternate Counselor – We are allowed to have an alternate Counselor, and currently do not have anybody in this position. Essentially the alternate Counselor is a backup Counselor who can use voting rights at meetings the Counselor can’t attend. Ideally we’d stagger the Alternate Counselor and Counselor election periods, so this would probably be a 2-year or 4-year term, if anyone is elected to this position.

Of note, we do already have candidates for Chair Elect, Secretary, and Counselor this year, so we’re in less of a pickle than in some years. But we still absolutely encourage you to run for election if you’re interested in serving on the Executive Committee. And there are other ways to get involved too, of course.

If you do want to run, just send us an email via the ‘contact us‘ link above, or let us know in person. I’ll get in contact with you later in October to get a photo, and a basic rundown of how you interact with Chemistry currently, and what role you’d like to play in the local section. This will all go on our website in time for the election in November. The ONLY requirement is that you be a full member of the ACS – professors, industry members, graduate students, and others are all able to serve on our executive committee, so long as they have paid their dues to the national society.

On a side note, we are planning to modify our bylaws in the near future to make Chair and Chair Elect 2-year terms each. We have found that recruiting for these positions is much more difficult than actually occupying them, and so will probably be making these changes and presenting them to the local section for a vote early in the new year.

Hi all, thank you to all of you who have applied to our small funding award program. It’s been really incredible to see all the chemistry-related activities that people are pursuing in the Ithaca area, and to do what we can to help people. That being said – we’ve been somewhat overwhelmed, particularly with travel-based awards to help students get to conferences and present their work! We really want to help as much as we can, but we also have to be as fair as we can in doing so. So, we are implementing a few rules moving forward.

1. Please send us all requests for funding to support conference attendance by the end of February. This will be out cutoff for supporting conferences happening between March of the current year (2026 in this case) and February of the following year (2027). We do understand that this may present unique challenges in scheduling in advance for e.g. the Fall ACS conferences, but the reality is we really need to see as much as we can at once so we can make our budget do the most good it can. If you’re not sure what your abstract will look like for a more distant conference, please at least give us a head’s up that you’ll be sending a more complete submission later.
2. We regret to say it, but we can probably only provide one award in this category to any given student in any given year. We just have so many people seeking help, it’s unfair to make multiple awards to the same person in a single year. We hope you’re all able to understand, and will be happy to support your peers in getting the same sort of assistance that you were able to previously enjoy.

So thank you all once again for helping us make this project such a great success, and for providing us stories from your conference experiences! On a side note, we’ll be posting all of the abstracts we’ve supported on this website just as soon as we have a chance to add them in, so keep an eye open for that, and be ready to read all of the great science the students in the Ithaca area are researching.

Thank you all for your participation in our summer picnic. We had a lot of great interactions, good food, and fun times. As always, we’re trying to make things a little bit more chemistry based each year – we had some great suggestions on our sign-board, including desire by some graduate students at Cornell to hold a Graduate Research Symposium similar to the one Undergraduates hold each year (see the post on that from a few months ago). We’d also like to give special thanks to Sierra Coathup, from the Ithaca ScienCenter, who was kind enough to come, share some outreach opportunities with interested students in particular, and even brought some on-site hands-on chemistry experiments for people to enjoy!

This is our major social event of the year. We’ll be doing this again next summer almost certainly, so do please reach out with any ideas for how to improve the event and make it suit your needs as members of the Chemistry community in the Ithaca area.

Hi all, many apologies for having gone silent for so long. It’s just been one of those years, as I think a lot of us are feeling. Still, it’s long past time to update everybody on what their ACS local section has been up to. So I’d like to start with some great photos of students from Ithaca College who we were able to help travel to the Fall national ACS conference. Many congratulations to these students for their hard work, and we hope they had a really enriching experience!

Since we started our request form a year or two ago, we weren’t entirely sure what to expect. But this year, utilization of these requests has really taken off. We’ve found ourselves in the happy position of helping quite a few students travel to ACS conferences, and we were able to help two students participate in international internships which would otherwise have been inaccessible. This is definitely one of the areas we think we can most positively make an impact – helping undergraduate students experience the wider world of Chemistry outside their classrooms, and showing them why it’s such a great career option. We are, unfortunately, pretty much tapped out on travel funds this year as a result of how successful applicants have been so far, but look forward to refreshing the coffers and providing similar assistance in the next year. Especially as funding becomes more difficult to obtain via traditional mechanisms, we feel that we can do a lot of good by helping to supplement such travel and conference participation. Of note: OTHER potential uses for the request form (materials for teaching classes, for example) we’ve still got some funds set aside for, so don’t hesitate to ask!

In the near future, we hope to add a page to this website detailing the students whose travel we have aided, the abstracts they have presented, and other pertinent details. Keep an eye on this space! And below, please take a look at a few photos one of our supported students, Aria Mingo, was kind enough to share with us!

We are happy to announce another amazingly successful poster session helping to bring together students at both Cornell University and Ithaca College. As always, this event was organized by undergraduate Chemistry students at each university, and they did an amazing job. This year, 21 students presented their work, and Dr. Kyle Lancaster gave a keynote lecture titled “Living on Nitrogen”, which explored some of the chemistry pursued by some organisms with rather different metabolic needs than our own. We are also delighted to have been able to sponsor poster awards for this years top presenters (in alphabetical order): Stephanie Chen (Cornell ’27) for her poster “Examining the Properties of DCA in the Process of Electrophotocatalysis”, Gaby Markle (Cornell ’26) and her poster titled “Engineering a Glucose-Responsive Cannula for Electronics-Free and Self-Regulating Insulin Release”, Tyler Huang (Cornell ’26) for his poster “Exploring roles for PPM1D in DNA replication stress and its potential use as a target in anti-cancer therapy”, and Rishabh Sen (Ithaca College ’26) and his poster “Design of the N-degron pathway-based BPTF PROTAC for neuroblastoma treatment”. As we’ve come to expect, all the students gave really excellent presentations, and we look forward to seeing many of them, and lots of new faces, next year.

Well, another year has come and gone, and what do we have to say for ourselves? A fair bit, actually! We obviously had a shakeup in our local section leadership, with both our Chair Justin Wilson and our Chair Elect Mikail Abbasov have accepted new employment outside of our area, and so we are happy to welcome Andrew Musser as our new Chair, and Phillip Milner as our new Chair Elect. Happily, our treasurer Leah McEwan has agreed to stay on for another term, so we will not lose all of her tremendous institutional knowledge and skill in that capacity.

Our events continue to evolve and improve, but we’re always eager to hear new ways we can help. In fact, one major change we made this year was to ask just that – those who attended our summer picnic hopefully noticed our new sign board, where we talk a little about ourselves and ask for ideas, and we got some great ones! What really came across was an interest among our members to expand opportunities for outreach – from the Ithaca Sciencenter, to the Bright Beams lending library, so the CORGI group, to local highschools, it’s pretty clear that many of our members, particular graduate student members, are eager for ways to make a difference in their community. For this year’s picnic, we’re hoping to facilitate just that, and are hoping to get a few different folks who are in need of chemistry-trained volunteers to attend, set up tables, and talk about what they do. If that’s YOU, please do drop us a line so we can make sure to get in touch when the weather starts turning warm again.

Our outreach efforts this year were pretty successful, too. We had a truly wonderful showing for ‘Spooky Science’ this year, with well over a dozen students helping to run hands-on activities and live demonstrations, showing young kids the fun you can have with chemistry. And we were happy to increase our sponsorship of the Expanding Your Horizons event this year, and help to fund a full bus-load of kids from a disadvantaged school, so they could attend this annual event and get some great exposure to college-level scientific activity.

We’ve also really pushed forward with our approach to sponsoring lectureships. We sponsor the Debye lecture at Cornell University every year, but realized that because of the location, only Cornell University faculty and students were likely to attend! As such, we’re now trying to record and distribute (on Youtube) these and any other lectures we sponsor. Some of the videos we’ve recorded have already gotten dozens of views, and we’re hoping that this will both allow other members of our local section to view these lectures by some of the top chemists in the world, and will perhaps eventually become a great archival resource moving forward.

We have of course also continued sponsoring various awards and recognitions, including High School prizes, poster prizes at the Cornell X Ithaca Undergraduate Symposium, and other events in the region. So it’s been quite a year, and we’re hoping for an even better one in 2025!

Hey all, are you an undergraduate student in the Ithaca area, looking for work this summer? Are you interested in outreach and public science education? The Ithaca Sciencenter is a pretty cool science museum, aimed at kids and families, with lots of hands-on activities and interactive exhibits. And they are accepting applications for an Education Assistant Intern for this summer! This position runs from mid-June to mid-August, comes with a healthy stipend of $7,300, and is supported by NASA. You do have to be a US citizen, and actively enrolled in an undergraduate degree program, to apply, and it is a full time position that does include working on weekends. If this is of interest to you, see the banner below to apply!

Many congratulations to Aria Mingo, an undergraduate student at Cornell University. Aria is the first person to have applied for funding through our web form, and was seeking ~$250 to fill in a funding gap, and allow her to travel to the Annual Biomedical Research Conference for Minoritized Scientists (ABRCMS), to present her work in a poster titled “Human Milk Oligosaccharides Ameliorate Nosocomial Infections as Protective Coatings”. Helping students to advance their careers as scientists is one of our top priorities as a local section, and while our funding is limited, we’re absolutely delighted to have been able to assist Aria in sharing her work.

Abstract: Increasing rates of morbidity and mortality within hospitals are caused by pathogenic bacteria colonizing indwelling medical devices. This abiotic surface adherence is caused by the ability of bacteria to form biofilms. Bacterial biofilms are three-dimensional communities of microorganisms surrounded by a self produced extracellular polymeric matrix. Bacterial biofilms confer increased resistance to antibiotics, resulting in invasive infections among immunocompromised patients. Human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs), the carbohydrate component of human breast milk, are known to promote growth of commensal bacteria while inhibiting the growth of pathogenic bacteria in the infant gut. Recent studies have shown that outside the neonate, HMOs have both antibacterial and biofilm-inhibiting properties. With this in mind, we employed HMOs as anti-adhesive coatings against various pathogens to assess abiotic bacterial adherence to various materials. HMOs were used to reduce bacterial adhesion on surfaces imitating those most commonly populated by nosocomial pathogens, including catheters, prostheses and pacemakers, among others. The ESKAPE pathogens (Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Enterobacter species) exhibit high antibiotic resistance and are responsible for 15.5% of hospital-acquired infections. Plastic surfaces (24-well plate base) and glass surfaces (glass coverslip) were exposed to HMOs for 12 hours. After the solution evaporated, bacterial cells were added to the surfaces and incubated. The next day, bacterial density (OD600) and biofilm formation (OD560) were spectrophotometrically determined. While HMO treatment did not elicit any changes in bacterial density, significant decreases in bacterial adherence were observed across strains assessed in this study. The results indicate that the addition of HMOs reduces the adherence of both gram-negative and gram-positive bacteria on both plastic and glass surfaces. This research highlights the potential for HMOs as protective coatings on indwelling medical devices to mitigate the spread of hospital-acquired infections.

We are happy to announce the winners of our 2024 Executive Committee election: Andrew Musser for Chair, Phillip Milner for Chair Elect, and Leah McEwan for Treasurer. Approximately 15% of our local section cast a vote, which is pretty good really! If you’d like to participate in the governance of the local section, our next election will be in October next year. And if you’d like to participate in any other way, we’d be happy to work with you. Otherwise, keep an eye on this space, and your email, for upcoming events, activities, and outreach opportunities!

Congratulations to all of our volunteers, and all the kids who they interacted with, at 2024’s Spooky Science event at the Ithaca ScienCenter! The ScienCenter is a great, hands-on science museum for kids, and every year they run a special ‘Spooky Science’ event with free admission and special Halloween-themed activities. This year, students from Cornell University helped students make slime (an event the parents assure us is much more enjoyable when the mess is in someone else’s house!) while students from Ithaca College helped to run some fun hands-off demonstrations for the kids to marvel at.

Many thanks to all of the volunteers for making the events a success, and to the ScienCenter for giving us a great chance to interact with so many fun kids!