Fall Semester:
9/5/19 Meeting: Welcome Dinner – Our annual welcome dinner went off without a hitch. The meeting focuses on allowing upperclassmen to reconnect after the summer while also integrating the new freshmen into the club. Good food and good times were had by all.
9/12/19 Meeting: Medicinal Chemistry and the Pharmaceutical Pipeline – Dr. Lizbeth De Selem and Dr. Matthew Bleich, PhD medicinal chemists at EMD Serono, joined us to speak about their work in the field of medicinal chemistry, and how the pharmaceutical pipeline functions. Several technical details about drugs that have already gone to market were explained thoroughly. In addition, they advertised some available co-op positions for the spring to our members.
9/19/19 Meeting: Multifunctional Metal-Organic Frameworks and Stimuli-Responsive Nanomaterials – Dr. Merry Smith from C2Sense spoke about her work with MOFs and how her research has changed throughout her career: from her early days in graduate school, learning about MOF/COF fundamentals, to her post-doc, where she explored engineering MOF-based sensors. This work allowed her to eventually get a job with C2Sense, a startup in Cambridge that works on creating gas phase chemical sensors.
9/26/19 Meeting: A Career in Business and Biotech – Dr. John Trzupek discussed his career path, beginning with the PhD he received from the Scripps Institute. After receiving his PhD, he went on to work as a medicinal chemist for a time before going on to get his MBA from the University of Chicago. He is now the CBO of KSQ Therapeutics. Dr. Trzupek’s passion for interdisciplinary research was apparent, and he spent time discussing different career path options with many of the undergrads.
10/3/19 Meeting: Co-op Mixer – This meeting was an opportunity for underclassmen and upperclassmen top mingle and discuss co-op. For first-time co-ops, discussion was mainly focused on interview tips and the best kinds of environments to work in. There were lots of students with different working backgrounds, from clinical co-ops, to med-chem, to materials science. There was also a VERY successful dessert potluck.
10/10/19 Meeting: Wastewater Treatment – Steve Rhodes and David Gottshall from the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority came in and gave a talk on municipal wastewater treatment and how it relates to chemistry. The talk mainly focused on the analytical techniques used to analyze a variety of samples for major pollutants.
10/17/19 Meeting: Eco-friendly Food Materials – Sezin Yigit came to discuss the chemistry she does at Cambridge Crops, a local start-up. Cambridge Crops works with silk proteins to create coatings for different food products ranging from leafy greens to chicken breasts. These coatings increase the shelf-life of products and decrease food waste.
10/24/19 Meeting: Seres Therapeutics – Seres Therapeutics is a local biotech that specializes in using live bacteria to develop therapies for diseases produced due to inadequacies of the gut microbiome. Emily Moreira from Seres came and spoke to us about the company’s techniques for depositing new bacteria into this microbiome, and how analytical development is important to this process.
10/31/19 Meeting: Spooky Mafia – In honor of Halloween we continued a time-honored tradition of playing a game of Mafia. Themed “The Haunting of Hurtig Hall,” the chemists were tasked with finding out who among them was working for a ghost to cause chaos in the Chemistry Department.
11/7/19 – Homecoming Week, No Meeting
11/14/19 Meeting: Movie Night – In this meeting we watched some episodes of the classic television show, The Magic School Bus, and had some great bonding experiences.
11/21/19 Meeting: Career Path AMA – Dr. Michelle MacLeod from Harvard EH&S talked to the undergraduates about her career path. From her graduate school experience at MIT, to a clean energy start-up, and finally to her most recent switch into safety, Michelle had a variety of perspectives and was able to answer a myriad of questions about what paths were right for specific people’s dreams and personalities.
12/5/19 Meeting: Winter Dinner – In celebration of the end of the semester, our members got together for a big dinner to relax before finals week.
Spring Semester:
1/9/20 Meeting: Welcome Back Dinner – Students convened for a dinner to get back into the swing of the semester and to welcome some new transfer students from the NUin program to the department and the club.
1/16/20 Meeting: Trivia Night – Our annual trivia night featured categories ranging from Chemistry to Pop Culture (and everything in between). Team SN2 Kool for Skool won in a tie-breaker question!
1/23/20 Meeting: Materials Science through the Decades – Dr. Andrew Dineen from Draper Labratories in Cambridge came to talk about work he’s done with different materials throughout the years. He focused especially on the importance of longevity in projects being applied to the Navy and to the US Government. Additionally, he discussed how environmental safety standards have improved in the past several decades.
1/30/20 Meeting: Preparing for Graduate School – Northeastern Professor Dr. Mabrouk came to discuss with the students different career paths after receiving an undergraduate degree; these paths ranged from pursuing a PhD to jumping into industry. She delved deeper into the specific challenges and benefits to each option.
2/6/20 Meeting: Game Night – Our members convened in Chem Central to play a variety of games, board and virtual! Some of the games played include Jenga, Mario Kart, and Settlers of Catan.
2/13/20 Meeting: Click Chemistry and Chemical Crosslinkers – Dr. Stephen Frayne, a senior chemist from the clean-energy start-up Via Separations, joined us to discuss his career in chemistry. He told us about his PhD work at Wesleyan, researching selective thiol-Michael reactions for the synthesis of polymers and dendrimers. He briefly discussed the work he performs at Via, in which he uses chemical crosslinkers to synthesize selective graphene oxide membranes.
2/20/20 Meeting: Joint Student Chapter with Dr. Jeremiah Johnson – This year, our annual Joint Student Chapter meeting was held in collaboration with Salem State University and Tufts University chemists. Our featured speaker was Dr. Jeremiah Johnson, a chemistry professor at MIT whose lab investigates polymer chemistry as a tool to solve problems in materials and electrochemistry. He took us through his unusual path towards a career in chemistry, including a brief stint as an actor, and discussed what it’s like to be a PhD grad interested in academia. He was an incredibly engaging speaker, and even delved into his thoughts on the modern problems faced by the chemistry industry (and how we might go about solving them).
2/27/20 Meeting: Clean Technology in Boston – Emily Reichert, CEO of Greentown Labs, came to speak to us about her career, as well as the establishment and current work performed by Greentown Labs. She took us through her impressive career path, including the expansion of the Warner-Babcock Institute and obtaining her MBA, keeping students engaged with personal stories and advice. Finally, she expanded on how Greentown Labs came to be, from a group of clean tech inventors in a shared Seaport space to the largest clean tech incubator in North America.
At this point in the year, we didn’t yet have the technological infrastructure in place to convert meetings to a virtual format to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, so NUSAACS took a bit of a recess for the rest of the semester. Until…
4/30/20 Meeting: The 2020 Chemmy’s! – This year, our annual NUSAACS superlative ceremony looked a little bit different, held over Zoom with screen-sharing instead of in Chem Central with physical awards. However, for our first-ever virtual meeting, it went very well! It served as a mood-booster to see so many faces of fellow members that we hadn’t been able to see in over a month, due to the pandemic. Many amazing chemists were honored, and the academic year was closed out in the best way possible.
