Congratulation to undergraduate and graduate students for wininning ACS DFW 55th meeting in miniature prizes. Emad Siddiki won 1st prize and the special prize in the undergraduate section. Muhammad Abbas won 2nd prize in inorganic and 2nd prize in environmental/organic sections. Simin Sheybani won 3rd prize in the inorganic sections.

Professor Kenneth J. Balkus, Jr. won the 2022 Robert H. Goddard Alumni Award for Outstanding Professional Achievement from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

C&en features our metal-organic framework (MOFs) crystals synthesized by Abbas. These crystals fluoresce bright red under ultraviolet light thanks to the rare earth metals embedded in the crystal structure. And that’s not all they can do—when the crystals are cooled with liquid nitrogen to 77 K, the fluorescence color turns from red to hot pink.

Congratulations Abbas and Emily ACS-MiM, and Siddiki for ACS-AMI best presentation awards.

Congrats to Dr. Juan Pablo for defending his PhD thesis on the “Synthesis And Characterization Of Metal-organic Frameworks For Potential Uses In Cancer Therapy”. Juan published 6 papers (a bunch more in the pipeline), and a book chapter.

ACS Catalysis highlights its most cited papers from around the globe: United States. Two out of top ten are from Balks lab. They congratulated prof. Balkus and all the authors as these broad ranging contributions are consistent with the original vision of ACS Catalysis to “…provide a venue for cross-cutting catalysis research, with an emphasis on contributions that describe catalytic molecules, macromolecules, or materials in fundamental, kinetic terms, utilizing catalytic site-based metrics such as turnover frequencies whenever possible, such that catalysts from all disciplines can be rigorously compared.”

Read the featured work

1. Hydrothermal Synthesis of Graphene-TiO₂ Nanotube Composites with Enhanced Photocatalytic Activity

2. Perspective of Recent Progress in Immobilization of Enzymes

Congrats to Dr. Alexander T Brown for defending his PhD thesis on the “Development of graphene-like carbons for energy storage and sequestration of lanthanide and actanide elements. Alex published a dozen+ articles and filed a US patent.

Muhammad Abbas and Yafen Tian won the photography contest organized by the ACS DFW local section during Chemists Celebrate Earth Week 2021. The left one is optical image of copper based metal-organic polyhedra (MOPs) and right one is TEM image of wrinkled mesoporous silica (WMS).

Four graduate students Juan Pablo, Yafen Tian, Nur Alam Siddiki, Marie Mortensen and two undergraduate students Andrew Vu and Abigail Lewis won prizes for their wonderful talks in the 53rd ACS DFW Meeting in Miniature (MiM) held on May 1st, 2021.