The ACS holds its national meetings every fall and spring. The spring meeting is usually in mid-to-late March. This fall, it was held in Chicago. Next spring, it’ll be in New Orleans, and I’ll without a doubt be there for that. New Orleans is one of my favorite US cities. The meetings usually rotate amongst major US cities. The current roster includes locations on the west coast (Anaheim, San Francisco, San Diego), the west/midwest (Denver, Chicago, Indianapolis), South (Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, New Orleans), and east coast (Boston, Washington, Philly, Orlando). Typical meeting attendance is around 14,000 scientists who come from all over the world. About 15% of meeting attendees are undergraduate students.

I attended the meeting as an invited lecturer. I also brought four UVU students from my group who gave presentations. A few years ago I applied for and received a research grant. from an organization called Organic Syntheses. They publish a journal of the same name, which is regarded as the gold-standard methods journal in synthetic organic chemistry. Synthetic organic chemistry is a field of science where people build molecules made principally of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen. As a past grant recipient, I was invited to give a 30-minute talk in a symposium titled Scientific Advances in Organic Synthesis from Primarily Undergraduate Institutions. A primarily undergraduate institution is one that does not offer Ph.D. degrees. My talk was titled, “Total Synthesis of Marine Natural Products with HaloGenZ.” My attempt at humor involves the play-on-words of HaloGenZ. I work with exclusively Gen Z students, so Halo-Gen-Z, but if you say the word like it sounds it just says “halogens.” The compounds we make all have halogens in them. Corny, right?

I always like to arrive the evening before everything starts up just so I can get settled, and, in this case, have extra time to practice my talk. On Sunday morning, the first full day, I walked around a bit to find a nice place for breakfast and took some photos. The Chicago skyline has a lot of newer glass and steel buildings, but I prefer Gothic and art-deco style buildings from the 1920s and 1930s. The Chicago Tribune building, finished in 1927, is my favorite. That’s the building on the right in the image below. The Chicago River also passes through downtown, evidenced by many walk/drive bridges, one of which is visible here. Then I practiced my talk a few times before my students arrived.

Once the students got there, I got them checked into the hotel and we went for lunch at the world-famous pizza restaurant, Giordano’s. Chicago is known for its tavern-style pizza and its deep-dish pizza. You can see both in the following picture. Nick demonstrates the signature cheese pull.

Later that afternoon, we explored Millennium Park and posed by the famous “Bean” for a group photo. An astute art aficionado, Ali pointed out that the sculpture’s official name is Cloud Gate.

I was then off to a dinner with the other invited speakers in my symposium, but was surprised by many A-list organic chemists who were also in attendance. It was a pretty intimidating atmosphere. That lasted from 6:30 until after 10.

On Monday morning, we went to the conference center early and attended some talks. The students also went to the Graduate Student Fair and the Career Fair, while I practiced my talk more. My students’ presentations were from 12-2pm. In the foreground is Ali, and behind her are Luke and Nick. You get a sense of the size of the room. It’s held in an enormous ballroom where they can fit hundreds of posters at the same time. Just rows and rows of them. We also caught up with UVU’s very own Dr. Lakshmi Viswanath. She brought her research student, Gabriel, who presented a poster at the same session. We all visited his poster and gave him some support. The symposium where I spoke lasted from 2-6pm, then we all went to grab a bite at a nice sandwich shop before the evening poster session, known as Sci-Mix, began. That lasted from 8-10pm. 

On the final full day, Tuesday, we did some sightseeing and team-building together and separately. Ali, Nick, and another member of my group, Anthony (red) visited the Willis Tower, which is the tallest building in Chicago. In the first pic we’re sitting on a deep-dish pizza seat, and the next one is from 1353 feet on the 103rd floor observation deck. Luke, who sojourned on his own, later said he walked over 26,000 steps that day. The next day, Wednesday, was our travel day back to Utah. We were all on the same flight and had a fun experience taking the “L” train together from downtown to the airport. Almost their entire trip was paid for by the UVU College of Science (COS), which offers dissemination grants to active COS majors. These four students have been in my group now for over two years and did a lot of work leading up to their presentations. I traditionally don’t consider pre-professional (med, dent, etc.) students or students majoring in Health Sciences for my research group, but I got really lucky with Ali, who’s a pre-med student.