ECS will be offering three Short Courses at the 227th ECS Meeting this May in Chicago. Taught by industry experts, the small class size makes for an excellent opportunity for personalized instruction helping both novices and experts advance their technical expertise and knowledge.

Register online today!

Short Course #3
Scientific Writing for Scientists and Engineers
Noel Buckley, Instructor

Are you a graduate student, postdoctoral fellow or senior researcher who would like to improve your writing skills? This course is for you! Are you a professor who spends time rewriting students’ drafts of journal papers? Then, send your students to this course or attend it yourself and learn how to improve both your own and your students’ skills! Good skills in written communication are increasingly important, whether you are in an academic or an industrial environment. The course is intended for scientists and engineers with an interest in developing their skills in writing scientific documents, including journal papers, dissertations, proposals, abstracts, and reports. Read more.

About the Instructor
Dr. Noel Buckley, past President of ECS, is currently Professor of Physics and the University of Limerick, Ireland and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Cast Western Reserve University. Prior to his shift toward academica, Dr. Buckley spent 17 years at Bell Laboratories where he played a key role in the development of epitaxial crystal growth and characterization of compound semiconductor films for high performance optoelectronic devices and earlier worked on the development of rechargeable lithium batteries. He has more than 70 research publications and has made numerous presentations at international conferences. He has organized many technical symposia and has edited ~20 volumes of symposium proceedings. He has taught a graduate-level course in Scientific Writing since 2006 at the University of Limerick and via webcast at five other universities, and he has taught the present short course at previous ECS Meetings in Vancouver, Las Vegas, Montreal, Boston, and Seattle.

Registration for the short courses has been extended through the start of the meeting.

ECS will be offering three Short Courses at the 227th ECS Meeting this May in Chicago. Taught by industry experts, the small class size makes for an excellent opportunity for personalized instruction helping both novices and experts advance their technical expertise and knowledge.

Register online today!

Short Course #1
Nanotechnology for Bioenergy: Biofuels to Fuel Cells
Shelley D. Minteer, Instructor

This course is perfect for those with an interest in biofuels and renewable energy. Attendees can expect to learn about the production and use of biofuels, the advances in synthetic biology that have improved biofuel production, advance sin ananotechnology that have improved electrochemical biofuel production, electrochemical uses of biofuel, and more—including fuel cells, enzmatic biofuel cells, and microbial biofuel cells. Read more.

About the Instructor
Dr. Shelley D. Minteer is most well known for her contributions to the use of catalytic cascades for anodic electrocatlaysis. In 2003, Professor Minteer co-founded Akermin, Inc. with her previous graduate student, which has focused on the commercialization of her biofuel cell technology and has moved on to carbon capture technology. Her roles with ECS have included: Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary-Treasurer, and Member-at-Large of the Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division, as well as being a member of multiple other Society committees. She is currently the technical editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and ECS Electrochemistry Letters.

LIVE WEBCAST: April 30th at 5:00pm
Find out more and register today!

Flow Batteries for Grid-Scale Energy Storage
Large-scale energy storage is required to meet a multitude of current energy challenges. These challenges include modernizing the grid, incorporating intermittent renewable energy sources (so as to dispatch continuous electrical energy), improving the efficiency of electricity transmission and distribution, and providing flexibility of storage independent of geographical and geological location. Read more.

How to Publish in ECS Journals
ECS publications span the entire subject area of electrochemistry and solid-state science. The Society publishes peer-reviewed technical journals, proceedings, monographs, conference abstracts, and a quarterly news magazine. The Society’s oldest title, Journal of The Electrochemical Society, has been in continuous publication since the Society’s founding in 1902.

Presented by Robert F. Savinell
Editor of the Journal of the Electrochemical Society and ECS Electrochemistry Letters.

ECS Student Member Benefits, Awards, and Travel Grants
ECS offers a variety of options for students to get involved. Tune in to find out more.

Presented by Beth Fisher
ECS Associate Director of Development & Membership Services

Space is limited! Register today!

Hosted by ECS and the Research Triangle Student Chapter of ECS.

ECS Short Courses are all day instruction designed to provide students or the seasoned professional an in-depth education on a wide range of topics.

Register online today!

Three Short Courses will be offered on Sunday, May 24, 2015.

Taught by industry experts, the small class size makes for an excellent opportunity for personalized instruction helping both novices and experts advance their technical expertise and knowledge.

Short Course #1
Nanotechnology for Bioenergy: Biofuels to Fuel Cells
Instructor: Shelley D. Minteer

Short Course #2
Fundamentals of Electrochemistry – Basic Theory and Thermodynamic Methods
Instructor: Jamie Noël

Short Course #3
Scientific Writing for Scientists and Engineers
Instructor: Noel Buckley

The registration fee:                                                             Students get a 50% discount:
ECS Members: $425                                                                 ECS Student Members: $212.50
Nonmembers: $550                                                                   Nonmember Students: $275

Become a member today and save over 20% on short courses!

Pre-registration is required. Deadline is April 24, 2015.

Learn more!

Gerischer’s immense contributions continue to leave an indelible mark, not only in electrochemistry, but also in physical chemistry and materials chemistry.

An article by Adam Heller, Dieter Kolb, and Krishnan Rajeshwar in the Fall 2010 issue of Interface.

Heinz Gerischer was born on March 31, 1919 in Wittenberg, Germany. He studied chemistry at the University of Leipzig between 1937 and 1944 with a two-year interruption because of military service. In 1942, he was expelled from the German Army because his mother was born Jewish; he was thus found “undeserving to have a part in the great victories of the German Army.” The war years were difficult for Gerischer and his mother committed suicide on the eve of her 65th birthday, in 1943. His only sister, Ruth (born in 1913), lived underground after escaping from a Gestapo prison and was subsequently killed in an air raid in 1944.

In Leipzig, Gerischer joined the group of Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer, a member of a distinguished family, members of whom were persecuted and murdered because of opposition to Nazi ideology. Bonhoeffer descended from an illustrious chemical lineage of Wilhelm Ostwald (1853-1932) and Walther Hermann Nernst (1864-1941), and kindled Gerischer’s interest in electrochemistry, supervising his doctoral work on periodic (oscillating) reactions on electrode surfaces, completed in 1946. He followed Bonhoeffer to Berlin where his PhD supervisor had accepted the directorship of the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the Humboldt University, and also became the department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry in Berlin-Dahlem (later the Fritz Haber Institute). Gerischer himself was appointed as an “Assistent.” Many years later, Gerischer would return to this distinguished institution as its director. With the Berlin Blockade and the prevailing economic conditions the post-war research was carried out under extremely difficult conditions.

Read the rest.

A bowl of “anelloni,” consisting of ring-shaped pasta made from linguine.
Credit: David Michieletto

If the complexities of polymer physics elude you, the scientists from the University of Warwick may have a way to more clearly explain this premise.

Davide Michieletto and Matthew S. Turner have taken to the kitchen in an effort to more clearly explain polymer complexities. In order to do this, the two physicists have created a new type of pasta called the “anelloni.”

The “annoloni” – which is the Italian word for “ring” – works as a sort of analogy to explain the complicated shapes that ring-shaped polymers can adopt.

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Madeleine Jacobs, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the American Chemical Society.
Credit: Peter Cutts

Madeline Jacobs has held steadfast to the idea of improving lives through the transforming power of chemistry during her career. Now, after seeing all she set out accomplish during her time as the American Chemical Society’s director and chief executive officer come to fruition, Jacobs is ready to move on to something new.

Jacobs started her career with the American Chemical Society (ACS) as a reporter for Chemical & Engineering News in 1969. Here, she rose in the ranks – becoming the magazine’s editor-in-chief in 1995.

Her work at Chemical & Engineering News prepared her for the role that she would take on in 2003 as ACS’s executive director.

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A recently conducted experiment may give us a better understanding of how the Earth possibly began.

Scientists took to the lab with a powerful 500-foot laser to re-create what might have been the original spark of life on Earth.

This from Associated Press:

The researchers zapped clay and a chemical soup with the laser to simulate the energy of a speeding asteroid smashing into the planet. They ended up creating what can be considered crucial pieces of the building blocks of life.

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After 30 years of research at Argonne National Laboratory, ECS’s Zoltan Nagy edits and updates his Electrochemistry Knowledge Base and serves as the ECS Historian.

What is electrochemistry? Why should society as a whole care?

Long time ECS member, Zoltan Nagy, is partnering with The Electrochemical Society in an attempt to answer these questions with the relaunch of his Electrochemistry Knowledge Base.

Since the late 90s, Nagy has been compiling this huge network of electrochemical knowledge in order to showcase why electrochemistry is so vital to the growth and nourishment of society.

“It may sound selfish, but I think electrochemistry is very important for society and people know very little about it,” says Nagy.

He began compiling the site during the infancy of the internet – around the second half of the 90s.

“I decided to put together a website for the education of the public,” Nagy says. “The articles are written in every simple language so that people can understand and see what electrochemistry does for society.”

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The image to your right may look like a fine art print of an ocean scene at night, but it’s actually just a close-up of some dried Glenlivet 162, or for those of you who aren’t avid alcohol connoisseurs – it’s simply a photo of whiskey.

Maybe “simple” is not the best word to describe the chemical process that takes place, but the discovery that whiskey can make these beautiful images had a humble beginning.

Professional artist and photographer Ernie Button started creating photos of the patterns formed after letting a drop or two of whiskey dry at the bottom of a glass, which resulted in these clear and rhythmic images.

Though he loved the aesthetic value, Button wanted to understand why the images looked the way they looked.

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