2019 in Review: Chemistry Student Seminar

Chemistry Student Seminar (CSS) is a student-run weekly seminar series for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers from all the divisions in the MIT Chemistry Department. Through the CSS series, we seek to enhance our community’s understanding of diverse research topics and to stimulate discussion across all divisions of chemistry. Researchers are provided with the opportunity to share their work, published and unpublished, with colleagues from different backgrounds, receiving valuable feedback. CSS talks can also serve as a venue for practicing upcoming job talks or conference presentations.

In the 2018–2019 academic year, we hosted 30 talks from students/postdoctoral scholars inside the department and 1 invited talk from outside. We thank our speakers (see table below) very much for their contributions! We also extend our gratitude to all those who attended the talks and initiated stimulating discussions after the seminars over donuts, bagels, and coffee.

To highlight a few of the talks, Dr. Junpeng Wang showed how mechanical force could manipulate polymers on the molecular-scale. Nicole Moody presented her PhD work on improving perovskite solar cells from a perspective of personal journey guided by with her passion for sustainability. Sam Kazer shared an interdisciplinary research for understanding immune responses to HIV inspection that augmented molecular biology with big data analysis.

We also welcomed our fourth CSS guest speaker, Prof. Shih-Yuan Liu from Boston College, who presented a talk titled “Translating New Chemical Space to New Function: The case of BN/CC Isosterism”. Prof. Liu continued to engage with students and post-docs throughout the day over lunch and in one-on-one meetings, enthusiastically sharing his experience and listening to the science that people shared with him.

Concluding such a wonderful year of CSS, we are continuing our series of excellent seminars every week in the 2019-2020 academic year. We are constantly working on the development of CSS and welcome your suggestions and contributions to improve it. Lastly, we are very grateful to the new, younger members of Team CSS.

We hope to see you at the next CSS!

AY 2018–2019:

• Tim Barnum (tbarnum@mit.edu)
• Soyoung Kim (soykim@mit.edu)
• Mike Geeson (mgeeson@mit.edu)
• Martin Riu (mriu@mit.edu)

Current:

• Martin Riu (mriu@mit.edu)
• Arun Sridharan (sridhara@mit.edu)
• Bryan Yuk-Wah Tang (brytang@mit.edu)
• Angela Lee (a_lee@mit.edu)
• Paul Thomas Cesana (pcesana@mit.edu)
• Tara Sverko (tsverk@mit.edu)

2018 Fall / 2019 IAP

2019 Spring