The long-awaited, much-needed new chemistry tower, which will serve a growing population of undergraduate chemistry students, is rapidly nearing completion.

In early March, I was sitting in the Union eating stir-fry, browsing through the multitude of COVID-19 articles. I spent the next hour concerned by something strange in my bowl when I really should have been concerned by the rising number of cases.

Morgan Howe, a new addition to Sam Pazicni’s group at the UW–Madison chemistry department, began her postdoctoral fellowship with a bang! She initiated a popular online literature discussion group, filling a need for chemists across the world to connect and learn virtually.

The Benzine is a newly developed art and literary magazine published each fall and spring by a group of chemistry graduate students. The editorial team includes Philip Lampkin (Gellman), Danica Gressel (Fredrickson), Robin Morgenstern (Pazicni), Rachel Czerwinski (Goldsmith), Jairo Villalona (Buller), and Sophya Alamudun (advisor TBD, first year).

COVID-19 has universally disrupted the way humans interact with other humans and the environment. With stricter enforcement of face coverings, handwashing and physical distancing, individuals and microbes are interacting differently.

When COVID-19 first hit, many people hastily adopted work-from-home protocols. Trips outside were limited to grocery runs; suddenly, fruits and vegetables became synonymous with ramen and ready-to-eat food choices. Social lives compressed to the six inches of mobile phone screens. Facetime Fridays with steaming cups of coffee, arguably with three too many shots of espresso, became routine. Today, even with the pandemic running rampant, things are very different. Slowly people are participating in more in-person activities; however, often without a complete understanding of the risks.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a call to action for many within the scientific community. Long-time collaborators, Lloyd Smith, professor of chemistry, and Nathan Sherer, associate professor of molecular virology and oncology with the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research and Institute for Molecular Virology, set out, along with their students, to contribute to the global understanding of SARS-CoV-2 by adapting the Smith group’s Hybridization Purification of RNA-protein complexes followed by Mass Spectrometry (HyPR-MS) technology to the study of SARS-CoV-2.

Read the full version of this press release here. Abridged version of a news release from the ACS Division of Organic Chemistry The American Chemical Society Organic Division released a new resource for organic chemists: OrganicChemistryData.org The idea and majority of the current content (~1500 html pages + 650 PDF files) is from the late …