UNE students represent Chemistry Club at ACS meeting in San Francisco

Three members of the UNE Chemistry Club, President Molly Wright (Biochemistry, ’17), Vice President Jessica Woolf (Biochemistry, ’17) and Brea Rivard (Chemistry and Applied Mathematics, ’19) recently traveled to San Francisco to represent the club at the 253rd national meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).  Also in attendance was the club faculty advisor, Amy Keirstead, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Physics and a member of the ACS Undergraduate Program Advisory Board.

The UNE students participated in several activities representing the club, including accepting their award for Outstanding Student Chapter and Green Chemistry Chapter (one of 46 and 52 chapters, respectively, to receive these awards nationwide) at the student awards ceremony.  Clad in their blue “UNe CHeM ClUB” periodic table t-shirts, the three performed green chemistry activities at the Chem Demo Exchange and represented the only student chapter to have a focused effort on green chemistry outreach.  As an “outstanding chapter,” the club was invited to present at the meeting’s Successful Student Chapters poster session to share their ideas and success stories with other undergraduate students and faculty. 

In addition to the official club functions, the students attended a wide variety of events ranging from networking and graduate school preparation workshops to technical talks and poster sessions. Rivard and Woolf also presented at the undergraduate research poster session.

The students’ travel was supported in part by the UNE Department of Chemistry and Physics, the UNE College of Arts and Sciences, NSF-RUI program CBET-1264511, the ACS Undergraduate Programs Office and the Maine Section of the American Chemical Society.