U.S. SECTION (Estab.1972)

2008 Spring Meeting 6.00 p.m., Saturday, May 17, 2008

Queensborough Community College of CUNY, Bayside (Queens), NY

Oakland Building (718-631-6262)

The Spring Meeting of the Royal Society of Chemistry (U.S. Section) was held at Queensborough Community College of CUNY, Bayside (Queens), NY on Saturday May 17, 2008. All members were encouraged to attend an evening that was instructive, entertaining and a chance to meet old and new friends. Several members stayed and enjoyed some of the ACS Middle Atlantic Regional Meeting which started at the College on Sunday, May 18^th (see panel below).

Queensborough Community College (QCC) is located in the suburban-like community of Bayside, Queens. QCC’s 34-acre campus consists of ten major buildings, which are used for instruction and extracurricular activities. Among them are the Holocaust Resource Center and an art museum. The campus and its nearby resources blend into the surrounding neighborhood and are easily accessible from midtown New York and the mid-Atlantic region.

The program of the RSC U.S. Section’s Spring Meeting provided even more justification to visit Bayside. The evening began at 6:00 p.m. with a reception featuring hors d’oeuvres and an open bar, followed by dinner at 7:00 p.m. After dinner our speaker was Prof. Yorke Rhodes of New York University, a regular attendee at Section events. He discussed the topic: “What’s New In Astrochemistry?”, which was of interest to the members of the Section. The meeting adjourned around 10 p.m.

James Badger, RSC USA President, welcomes attendees and introduces the speaker

Prof. Yorke Rhodes speaking to the RSC USA spring meeting

PROGRAM

6:00pm Social Hour and Networking Reception, Open Bar

Hors D' oeuvres

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Chicken sate, Coconut shrimp
Fresh sliced fruit. Imported cheese and crackers

7:00pm Dinner

Main Course

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EITHER

Filet mignon with wild mushroom ragout

OR

Thai chicken with basil black bean sauce

OR

Fettuccini with baby vegetables

Served with twice baked potato, fresh vegetable medley or wild rice and fresh baby carrots and green beans

Southampton mesculin salad and vinaigrette

Dinner rolls and butter

Dessert

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Coffee, Tea, and NY Cheese Cake

8:15 pm Presentation What’s New In Astrochemistry? - Prof. Yorke Rhodes

If the physical world that we know and the universe is described by the same Physics, i.e., if Physics is universal, is chemistry also universal? Do the rules that we know continue beyond earth? Before 1960 that question was rarely raised. No one thought much of chemistry off-earth. Yes, there was known to be water, CO and CO₂ in the space around earth and around other planets, and yes even in the spectra of some stars. Such spectra were used to measure properties of some stars, but one didn’t think of those molecules as chemistry.

The myriad of chemicals known on earth did not lead people to search off earth. There were enough problems to solve. But we are now 50 years since Sputnik. Since the explorations that began in earnest since the ’60’s, what discoveries have been made! There are now known over 130 different molecules off-earth, out of the solar system, interstellar, intergalactic. Practically everywhere one looks in the heavens there are many molecules. Is the chemistry similar to what we know here on Earth? Three quarters of the now-discovered molecules are what we would call organic – some are similar to earth chemistry, some are exotic, all follow rules of structure and energy that we know, but many are very different and have unusual structures that we don’t find in our more temperate surroundings.

A subtitle could be: “Recent Advances in the Chemistry of Natural Products”. Come learn about some unusual structures, and some possible reactions. Let’s see what we can predict.

About our RSC-US Spring Meeting speaker: Prof. Yorke Rhodes

Yorke Rhodes graduated from the University of Delaware with the B.S. in 1957 as the Senior of the Year for his college. First research was in Soil Chemistry involving chromatography of amino acids and carbohydrates. He received the M.S. in Chemistry in 1959 with William A. Mosher and Darryl Lynch. His M.S. thesis detailed the first ion exchange separation of all naturally occurring amino acids on only one column and employed pressure and gradient HCl-concentration elution. At the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana he completed the PhD Dissertation with Prof. James C. Martin in 1963, entitled “The Mechanism of the Reaction of Cycloheptatriene with Sulfur Dioxide" and was where he learned to apply practical “shirt-sleeve” Physical Organic Chemistry as an NIH Predoctoral Fellow. Rhodes then went to Yale University as Postdoctoral NIH Fellow with Ken Wiberg and learned more small-ring mechanistic chemistry and began to learn theoretical organic chemistry.

In 1965 he joined the faculty of New York University at the University Heights campus and developed research areas in liquid SO₂ solvent chemistry (properties of salts and salt effects on reaction rates in liquid SO₂), electrocyclic reactions, small ring chemistry and carbocations, especially neighboring group-assisted rearrangements, and established conditions for cyclopropane migratory aptitude studies. He moved to the Washington Square campus in 1973 after a sabbatical leave with Horst Prinzbach at the Universitat Freiburg in West Germany. Work at the Square continued in carbocations and in neopentyl rearrangements and lead to alkyl migratory aptitude studies, especially in neopentyl and pinacolyl systems, alkylated-cyclopropane -pentacoordinate carbocation intermediates, and to synthetic studies in silyl ketene acetal chemistry for general syntheses of substituted quarternary neopentyl systems. Theoretical chemistry studies of carbocations proceeded apace, and lead ultimately to Astrochemistry, studies of the stability and modes of formation of astromolecules, molecules in planetary atmospheres and in interstellar clouds. 


Prof. Rhodes was Visiting Professor in Organic Chemistry in Freiburg with Horst Prinzbach (1972 – 1973), and was Gastprofessor with Ivar Ugi and Dieter Lenoir at the Technische Universitat Munchen in 1977, and returned for a second stay at Munich as Alexander von Humboldt U. S. Senior Scientist Awardee in 1978. Other honors include a US State Department Exchange Visit to Prague, Czechoslovakia and to Zagreb, Yugoslavia in 1977. He was also a NASA/IEEE Summer Faculty Fellow with Wes Huntress, Director of Space Science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories at Cal Tech in 1980 and again in 1981 (Astrochemistry). In summer 1987 he was Visiting Professor at the Centre d’Astrophysique, Universite de Grenoble, France with Alain Omont. He was visiting Professor at Harvard University in Fall 2001, with his former undergraduate scholar, Eric Jacobsen, and also visiting Professor at Hunter College, CUNY in Spring 2001.

Rhodes has twice been awarded the Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence in the NYU College of Arts and Science (1991 and 1996) and was selected by Chemistry Major students as the First Annual Best Professor Award in the Chemistry Department in 1993 and again in 2000. He received the NYU Great Teacher Award with Stipend from the NYU Alumni Association in 2000. He was Director and co-Founder of the joint Dual Degree BS/BE Program in Engineering and Science at New York University and Stevens Institute of Technology from 1987 to 2000. In 2006 - 2008 he served on the NYC Mayor’s “Green Cleaning Advisory Task Force.

He resided in the University’s Brittany Residence Hall with his family as “Professor-In-Residence” from 1981 – 2000. At his official retirement from NYU the Brittany Hall student residents renamed their Study/Meeting/Party Hall “The Rhodes Room” in his honor. He has been active in the New York Academy of Sciences and the New York Section of the American Chemical Society serving on many committees in both organizations and also served as Chair of both. He served six years on the National ACS Local Section Activity Committee, and lead LSAC as Chair 2002 - 2004. He currently serves on the Council Policy Committee of ACS and as Councilor for the New York Section. Hobbies are grand opera and progressive jazz, travel – especially by rail, and gourmet dining.

Several members of RSC-US visited the Queens Botanical Garden, (43-50 Main Street, Flushing, NY 11355) at 1 p.m. on Saturday.