Volume 11 January 1997 No. 1
Publisher: Department of Chemistry
Alistair J. Lees, Professor and Chair
David C. Doetschman, Professor and Interim Chair
Editor: Clifford E. Myers, Professor Emeritus
Production Editor: Pat Gorman, Department Secretary
Mailing Address: Department of Chemistry
Binghamton University (SUNY)
P.O. Box 6016
Binghamton, NY 13902-6016
Telephone: (607) 777-2517 Department Office
(607) 777-2229 Editor
FAX: (607) 777-4478
E-Mail: cmyers@binghamton.edu
This issue of the CHEMISTRY NEWSLETTER is dedicated to the memory of Martin A. Paul who died April 22, 1996. Professor Paul was the first chemistry faculty member at Triple Cities College of Syracuse University in 1946 which became Harpur College of SUNY in 1950. A native of New York City, he was an undergraduate at City College and a graduate student at Columbia. He was a faculty member at City College prior to World War II and was involved in explosives research during the war. He retired from Harpur in 1965 to become Executive Secretary for Chemistry and Chemical Technology of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council. He is survived by his wife, Genevieve Wells Paul, and his daughters and their husbands, Harriet and Henry Jonquière and Dorothy and Duvall Jones. Mrs. Paul's address: 1772 Horatio Ave., Merrick, NY 11566.
A conversation with Bruce McDuffie
Concerning the Chair of the Department itself, Professor Alistair Lees has agreed to lead the Department for another three-year term beginning in the fall semester of 1997. As Professor Lees is on leave (see FACULTY notes) for the spring semester, I am serving as Interim Chair for the spring and summer.
I'd like to begin by thanking Cliff Myers, the Chemistry Newsletter Editor, not only for the splendid job in preparing this and previous issues, but more importantly for his concept of the Chemistry Newsletter. In my first week as Interim Chair, in a rare moment's peace (!), I find myself contemplating the nature of the Department I serve. A young institution may have energy, success, growth...but it has no history. An established institution may have visibility, longevity, respect...but no history unless someone documents it. An established institution may even have a history but no soul. I'm sure that I express the feeling of all faculty, staff, students and alumni in recognizing Cliff's vision. He has not only begun an ongoing history of the Department in the first issues of his editorship, but has also brought soul to this issue with his rounding out the series of foundation interviews and with his success in eliciting the most extensive set of alumni responses that I have ever seen in a departmental alumni newsletter. In this issue I sense a bringing together of the young and the old (and still fiercely kicking, Bruce!), the past and the present, and the teacher and student in us all. This is the real educational soul of the Department.
This issue so thoroughly documents the important recent events in the Department that I shall refrain from saying much more. I'd like to add my own grateful tribute to the many years of dedicated service of the late Annie Cron (details follow below). The Department welcomes our new analytical chemistry faculty member, Omowunmi "Wunmi" Sadik, and wishes her success. Dr. Sadik joins a terrifically energetic pair of assistant professors, Drs. Jones and Musfeldt. We are presently in the thick of a search for another assistant professor in analytical chemistry.
I am awed by and deeply appreciate the many, many of you alumni who have taken the time to tell us about your lives and your many fine accomplishments. What better thanks and satisfaction can we have as department faculty and staff!
As to the academic health of the Department in the Binghamton University context, we have wintered several difficult years of budget cuts and attrition and are emerging into somewhat brighter days. The Department remains extraordinarily active, strong and competitive, to which the following articles attest. We have the commitment of the university to begin recovering lost faculty positions and to enter into a period of increased departmental financial autonomy.
Udo Brinker has been appointed to a chair (Professor Ordentlich) of Organic Chemistry at the University of Vienna in Austria. He is on leave from the department this academic year.
Olivier Martin has been appointed to a chair (Professeur Ordinaire) in Organic Chemistry at the University of Orléans in France. He will be on leave from the department during the next calendar year.
Alistair Lees will be on sabbatical leave in the spring and summer of 1997 at the University of York in England. His plans include some laser experiments and writing. David Doetschman is serving as Interim Chair while Alistair is away.
Stan Madan continues to be an important part of the Department's life. In particular, he maintains contact with many of the alumni, and a number of items in the ALUMNI NEWS section of this issue have come through his communications. Thanks, Stan!
Max and Doreen Hull have sold their house in Binghamton and have moved to be with their daughter Margaret. Their address: P. O. Box 265, 243 W. St. Joseph St., Pomona, NJ 08240.
Annie Cron died in April after a long and courageous battle with cancer. She had retired in the spring of 1995 after more than 35 years of service to Harpur College and Binghamton University-SUNY. She served as secretary for two Division Chairs and at least ten Department Chairs. She is survived by her husband John, one daughter, three sons, and three grandchildren.
Carole Kull retired at the end of the spring semester, and Mary Bridge moved into her position in the General Chemistry laboratory program. Bob Kematick replaced Mary on the Organic laboratory staff. Carole's address: 30 Clipper Lane, Dennisport, MA 02639.
Visit the department's Web Page at /. There you will find back issues of the Chemistry Newsletter as well as faculty profiles, program descriptions, and other potentially useful and interesting information.
We are contemplating an electronic version of the Chemistry Newsletter in addition to the printed version. If you would like to receive the electronic version in place of the printed one, let us know. It will save us postage and printing costs. The "information super-highway" has reached us here at the Chemistry Newsletter in that half of our alumni respondents, more or less, used E-Mail!
Members of the chemistry faculty are prominent in new initiatives in undergraduate instruction. The University's newest research center, the Center for Teaching and Learning, is co-directed by a "troika" consisting of Jim Dix and Wayne Jones from Chemistry and Anna Tan-Wilson from Biology. The aims of the Center are to serve as a catalyst for educational innovation, to encourage faculty to explore new directions in pedagogy, and to find sources of funding for these efforts. The focus is on finding resources to support teaching innovation and cross-disciplinary collaboration. One of the initiatives is entitled "Science Across the Curriculum" (SxC) which will work to incorporate science into the non-science curriculum. Activity is envisioned on three levels: a) required science electives which are part of the General Education curriculum, recently implemented campus-wide, b) linked courses that incorporate science into areas such as the humanities, and c) hybrid courses which will be taught by teams of science and non-science faculty. One example of a linked course is Susan Bane's participation in an English course, Folklore. Susan talked to the class about the pharmacology of folk remedies, their chemical basis, and possible danger of herbal cures. Another initiative of the Center is development of an electronic chemistry learning environment which is spearheaded by Jim Dix and Wayne Jones. This effort is currently funded by publishing companies and SUNY's Office of Educational Technology. In the first stage, which was put into operation this past semester in both Chem. 101 and Chem. 107, students do homework assignments on the web. Results are stored on a web server, and the instructor can respond electronically. In addition, there are electronic simulations, multi-media presentations, and hypermedia jumps to other sites. Feedback from the students has been quite positive.
In a related development, Bruce Norcross has been blazing the trail for the use of technology and innovation in the large organic courses. Bruce makes use of "Smart Classrooms", lecture halls recently equipped by the University for multimedia use. In each there are two high end computers (Mac and PC), a laser disc player, a CD ROM drive, a VCR, and a computer connection that can be made to the Internet, the university mainframe, or to the instructor's office. A typical Norcross "lecture" involves scrolling notes on one screen which outline the lecture, diagrams on another, and a full-color video on a third. All this is coordinated to his direct interaction with students in the classroom. The presentation is followed by small group discussions led by graduate and undergraduate TAs. Following Bruce's lead several other members of the faculty are incorporating multimedia presentations into their courses.
More information on both programs can be obtained from appropriate web pages:
Dix/Jones: http://www.clt.binghamton.edu
Norcross: http://www.oet.suny.edu/clt/cltnews
Jan Musfeldt has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant totaling $330,700 from the National Science Foundation. CAREER grants are awarded to young scientists on the basis of both quality research and an educational thrust. Jan's research will focus on how certain phase modifications of organic and inorganic solids are stabilized by the application of a magnetic field. Jan uses spectroscopic studies of single crystals at low temperatures in a magnetic field to study magnetic ordering phenomena which compete with superconductivity. As she recently put it, "We're trying to learn how materials dissipate energy, which mechanisms are important to the stabilization of various ground states, and how one can 'tune' between different states." Jan's educational activities involve the use of technology in the classroom. Her various projects include multimedia lectures for Physical Chemistry, introduction of new thermal analysis and chromatography equipment into the undergraduate Physical, Biophysical, and Polymer labs (funded by an NSF-ILI grant), and Web-based distance education at the graduate level.
Our newest faculty member, Omowunmi Sadik has received a three-year grant from the Environmental Protection Agency in the amount of $359,455. The purpose of the project is to develop and carry out field demonstration of electroactive polymer-based biosensing systems which use microelectrode arrays and individually addressable sensing chips in a multi-analyte sensing format for environmental analysis. The focus will be on the design, synthesis, and complete characterization of antibody and enzyme-modified macroelectrodes by use of electrochemical, spectroscopic, and surface microscopic techniques. There will be practical application studies to probe interactions between the modified electrodes and certain environmental compounds, particularly those predominant in assessment of pollution in ground water and air. The goal is to assemble the basic chemical and biological information necessary to identify, characterize, measure and therefore predict environmental pollutants by providing a cheaper alternative to environmental monitoring and assessment studies and thereby contribute significantly to the protection of human health and the environment.
David Doetschman expects the Regional Pulsed EPR and Photochemistry Center to be in full operation by May or June of 1997. It was decided to delay acquisition of a spectrometer in order to obtain one of the first new Bruker ELEXSYS system pulsed EPR instruments. This new instrument was announced by Bruker in August and has much improved time resolution and better speed and convenience of data acquisition. Auxiliary instrumentation is in process of being installed and includes a magnet, an optical cryostat and pump for operation to 2K, and both excimer and Nd-YAG lasers. There has been a series of users seminars involving both people within the Department and those from other institutions. Both Dave Dwyer (PhD'91) and Apostolos Rizos (PhD'85) plan to spend a sabbatical year at the Center in 1997-98. Dave plans summer visits as well. Dave is on the faculty at the SUNY College at Brockport, and Apostolos is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Heraklion in Greece.
Our department, like all other chemistry departments across the country, finds itself in need of additional resources. Funds from the state are limited in amount and are fenced in by numerous regulations. Research grants from external sources make possible the vitality of individual laboratory efforts but necessarily have a circumscribed focus. We have been able to generate some additional support for our undergraduate program by publication of our own lab manuals for the big courses. However, we still have needs which you can help us meet. These include:
Emergency repairs for instructional and research equipment.
Graduate student participation in scientific conferences.
"Bridging" support for faculty who are between grants.
The department's colloquium program.
Graduate student recruiting expenses.
Student awards.
Undergraduate student activities.
Graduate student activities.
Your gifts should be to the Binghamton University Foundation, Account #785 (for programs in the Chemistry Department). We thank all of you who already have contributed toward the department's needs.
Some of you will remember Joseph Sylvanovich (MA'72) who did his research with Stan Madan. Joe was a mentor for Joseph Alila and other Kenyan students who have come to Binghamton for graduate study. After he finished his degree, Joe joined the Peace Corps and went to teach at St. Paul's Amukura, a school near the Ugandan border in Kenya. Alila and some other students transferred to St. Paul's in May of 1976 because of its excellent reputation, but found that the school was without a chemistry teacher, since Sylvanovich had returned to the U.S. It turned out that the job market was bad at that time, and Sylvanovich returned to Kenya in January of 1977, again to teach at St. Paul's. As a result of Joe's efforts and despite the time without a chemistry teacher, Alila and his classmates did quite well in the required examinations. Alia moved on to Kenyata University where he earned a BSc in 1981 with first class honors in chemistry, math and education. Following graduation he became a high school chemistry teacher and began a successful effort to modernize the laboratory program patterned after what he had learned from Sylvanovich. Alila returned to Kenyata University for his MSc and taught for several years in a teacher's college. He is currently on leave from a faculty position Egerton College. During this period he learned that Sylvanovich had died under somewhat unclear circumstances. In 1993 Alila came to the University of Alberta in Canada and in 1995 transferred to Binghamton where he is a student of John Eisch. It was only in a conversation with Stan Madan that he learned that Sylvanovich had studied here. Alila says, "When I think of my historical connection to Sylvanovich, I don't think it's an accident that I am here. I think maybe his spirit brought me here, and I am proud." [Taken from an article in the November 14, 1996, issue of INSIDE Binghamton University.]
Mike Sulich (BA'54,MA'67) has retired from IBM-Endicott and is enjoying work as a substitute teacher of chemistry and science at Seton High School. He also does wedding videos on a limited basis.
Mary Anne Cembalski Opalski (BA'62) works for the U.S. Government in the Washington, DC, area. She particularly enjoyed the "Conversation with Stan Madan" in our last issue. She recalls Harpur as a school with small classes and a lot of individual interactions between students and faculty - quite a contrast with the 600+ in general chemistry these days! Her address: 8612 Lantern Lane, Clinton, MD 20735.
Ed Cain (BA'64) is still on the faculty (since 1974) at Rochester Institute of Technology. His interests are in inorganic and general chemistry and in chemistry for the handicapped. RIT has 1200 deaf students, and Ed uses sign language in teaching. His E-mail address: CAIN.BE@a1.rit.edu
Bill Reiff (BA'64) is Chair of the Chemistry Department at Northeastern University in Boston. He did undergraduate research with Stan Madan and went on to Syracuse for his PhD (1968). Back in November he gave us a departmental colloquium seminar on his recent research in the field of magnetic materials.
Frances Mazze Hurwitz (BA'66) is a research scientist in the ceramics branch of NASA-Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, OH. Her specialties are polymers and composites. Her E-mail address: Frances.Hurwitz@lerc.nasa.gov
Anne M. Donohue Wagner (MA'66) has been a Teaching Associate at Skidmore College in Satatoga Springs, NY, since 1979. From 1965 to 1969 she was Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse. She and her husband John have three children: Janet (28), James (25), and Joseph (21). Anne hopes to see many Binghamton folks at NERM-27 in June at Saratoga.
Fred R. Smith (BA'67) went on to get his PhD at UC-San Diego in 1970 and his MD at the New Jersey College of Medicine in 1974. He had a fellowship in gastroenterology in 1979 at the University of Miami and has had a G-E practice in Lake Worth, FL, since then. He and his wife (Peggy Opper, BA'68) have three children: Joshua (22), in chiropractic school; Lisa (19), an undergraduate at Penn; and Seth (17), a high school senior. Their address: 311 Fairway CT., Atlantis, FL 33462.
Alan Kenien (BA'68) and his wife, Janet, and their two daughters reside in Fargo, ND. They have survived the worst winter in ND history with wind chills of -99° and five blizzards! Alan sends regards to all his former classmates. Address: 2985 Peterson Pkwy., Fargo, ND 58102.
Myron White (BA'71) was with the Taylor Wine Co. from 1971-75 in quality control and environmental matters. Since then he has been in real estate consulting and appraising, specializing in litigated matters with emphasis on environmentally contaminated structures and land. He has two sons, Matt (15) and Reed (11). He owns The Fox Inn Bed and Breakfast in Penn Yan (800-901-7997) and offers a 10% discount to students, grad students, and professors at Harpur College - oops - SUNY Binghamton - oops - Binghamton University. Address: 158 Main St. Penn Yan, NY 14527. E-Mail: 103750.251@compuserve.com
Bruce Lipshutz (BA'73) is one of the 1997 winners of the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Awards (cf. C&EN, 1/27/97). He is Professor of Chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Paul Bertan (MA'74,PhD'95) is still Professor of Chemistry at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse. We are saddened to learn that his wife died of a coronary attack last February at age 58. She had lived long enough to PhT (put hubby through) to a PhD just one year earlier. She and Paul met while students at Albany, and they have three grown children and four grandchildren. Paul's address: Chemistry Department, Onondaga Community College, Syracuse, NY 13215. E-Mail: bertanp@goliath.sunyocc.edu
William G. Root (MA'75) is in Supplier Quality Management at Pharmacia and Upjohn, a unit which is part of procurement. Bill started with Upjohn which recently merged with Pharmacia. He obtained an MBA in Finance at Western Michigan in 1995. He and Lorraine Webb were married in 1971 and recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. They have two children: Chris (21) who is a student at Kalamazoo College, and Brandon (17). Address: 55560 CR671, Paw Paw, MI 49079.
William H. Fordyce (BS'76), who did undergraduate research with Peter Sheridan, got his PhD with Glenn Crosby at Washington State Univ. in 1981. He had a postdoctoral with Jack Halpern at Chicago (1981-83) and has been with Dow Chemical since then. He recently was transferred to Houston and travels quite a bit to all parts of the world in his new position. He is married and has one child.
Dana T. Graves (BA('76) went on to dental school at Columbia and took specialty training at Harvard. He obtained a Doctor of Medical Sciences degree in Oral Biology at Harvard and joined the faculty of the University of Texas at San Antonio. Later he moved to Boston University Medical School where he was promoted to Professor in 1993. He enjoys a dual career - 4 days running a research lab and 1 day practicing periodontics. He and his wife Natalie (a gynecologist) met at Columbia, and they have three children. E-mail: dgraves@acs.bu.edu
Janet M. Lansinger (MA'76 with Bruce Norcross) earned her PhD at Washington State University and worked several years for Georgia Pacific in Bellingham, WA. Ten years ago she moved to New Jersey where she works for American Cyanamid as Senior Research Chemist in metabolism. She says her work is concerned with EPA registration of herbicides and is a great combination of organic and analytical chemistry. She keeps in touch with Bill Fordyce and Evon Martins who did her PhD with Pete Sheridan in 1979. She notes that Jay Ansell (PhD with Hassner) was to be giving a talk at Cyanamid. Jan says she has two great kids, 10 and 12 (one of each), who are both getting lots of science and computers from their mother. She sends greetings to Bruce Norcross. E-Mail: lansingerj@pt.Cyanamid.com
Shakoor Khan (PhD'77, Schrier) was at Dow for some years, then moved to Johnson's Wax. He and his wife Asra have two children. His address: 2069 Westfield Drive, Gurnee, IL 60031.
Andrea Snyder (BA'77) went to medical school at the University of Michigan and completed a residency in psychiatry there. She is working in a local mental health clinic. In 1990 she married Robert Bolger who is also a psychiatrist. They have two sons, Joshua (6) and Alexander (born last February). Address: 21 Bloomingdale Rd., White Plains, NY 10605.
Paul Gelburd (BA'78)says he has strayed far from chemistry. After a long career at Morgan Stanley M&A, he is currently investing General Electric's capital in private equity. He reports that Harry Bigham (BA'78; 301-570-1849)) and Ron Nudel (BA'78; 203-772-4689) spend their time reaming arteries in private practice. Paul's address: 36 West 84th St., #5B, New York, NY 10024.
Susan Marcus Stern (BS'79) says it is a pleasure to receive the Chemistry Newsletter and to be able to catch up on news. In addition, she reports looking up the Binghamton University Home Page and following that to the Materials Research Institute. Susan obtained an MS in Pharmacology in 1981, married and moved to California. They were within five miles of the epicenter of the '94 Northridge earthquake! She completed an MS in engineering in '91 and now works as a Materials Engineer for Rocketdyne, the Rockwell division which builds the main engines for the space shuttle (among other things). E-mail: smstern@rdyne.rockwell.com
Lisa Kulikowski Mihalko (BS late '70s?) obtained a pharmacy degree at Albany and works locally as a pharmacist. Her address: 1173 Green Meadow Lane, Endicott, NY 13760.
Charles A. Joseph (BA'80) is in business as CAJ RadTech Associates. He would like to see the University develop either certification or degree programs in Industrial Hygiene or its equivalents. Address: 64 Nagel Hill Road, Candor, NY 13643. FAX: 607-659-4900
Michael J. Saliby (PhD'80, Madan) is Professor of Chemistry at the University of New Haven. After 8-1/2 years as department chair, Mike has returned to full-time teaching and is looking forward to a sabbatical and research activities this coming year.
Mark Weiss (MA'80) is with the Lederle Laboratories Division of American Cyanamid which recently merged with American Home Products. Mark has worked as a pharmaceutical chemist, analytical development chemist, medical writer, and pharmaceutical formulationist. He received an MS in Specialized Journalism in 1985. In addition to his work at Lederle, he is a freelance trade journalist and writer on topics in biotechnology and chemical industries. He has published over 75 articles in about 15 trade magazines and scientific journals, some in the ACS publication, Today's Chemist at Work. Mark and his wife Ilene were married in October 1985, and they live in Spring Valley, NY. Ilene is a special education teacher in Yonkers. Mark sends greetings to Mike Starzak, Dave Doethschman, and Richard Quest. E-Mail: Mark_Weiss_at_USPRMG10@internetmail.pr.cyanamid.com
Lisa Benson (BA'81, MA'83)) and Lee Guterman (BA'81) are in the Buffalo area. Lee did a PhD in Physical Chemistry at Clarkson in 1985 and an MD at Buffalo in 1989. He completed his neurosurgery residency in 1995 and was to complete his fellowship training in June 1996 in endovascular surgery. His research is in the area of stroke and blood flow. Lisa received her MD at Buffalo in 1988 and completed her residency in internal medicine in 1991. Her research is in medical education. They were married in 1985 and have 3 children: Eve (7), Beryl (4), and Sidney (1). Address: 238 Hendricks Blvd., Amherst, NY 14226. E-Mail: LBenson@ubmedc.buffalo.com
David Gasper (BS'81) recently finished a law degree; he has a master's degree in chemical engineering from Texas Tech. He is still associated with DuPont and is making use of both aspects of his education in his work for the company. He finds this exciting, new professional experience very rewarding.
Richard Posner (BA'81) is a tenured Associate professor of Chemistry at Northern Arizona University. He came there in 1993 after a post-doc at Los Alamos. He reports that at NAU there is a new emphasis on scholarship to go along with a long tradition of undergraduate teaching. His department has hired 7 tenure-track faculty since 1993 and is searching for 3 people this year. He says he could not have chosen a better place to live and work. Address: Department of Chemistry, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5698. E-Mail: Richard.Posner@nau.edu
Mark Rerek (MA'81) has been appointed director, skin care research and development, International Specialty Products, Wayne, NJ (noted in C&EN).
Elizabeth Patterson White (BS'81) was with Texas Instruments for a short while, then joined Intel in Oregon where she stayed for about 5 years, and was transferred by Intel to the Bay Area in California. There she met a fellow employee of Intel whom she married. After 4-1/2 years in the Bay Area, they moved back to Oregon and stayed there for another 5 years before moving to their present location in Arizona. Both Liz and her husband are managers with Intel. They have two daughters, born after their move to Arizona. E:Mail: Elizabeth_White@ccm.ch.intel.com
Bruce Wilson (BS'81, MS'84, Madan) is Laboratory Manager of the Chemistry Section of Pall Trinity Micro Corporation in Cortland, NY, where he supervises a staff of eight. He has two children: Ryan (13) and Heather (6-1/2), and is a scoutmaster for his son's troop. His wife Kathy wants to go back to school to finish a pharmacy degree. E-Mail: w1003rpw@odyssey.net
Pat Bobik (BS'82) and Steve Sexsmith (PhD'88) were married in 1988 and live near Harrisburg, PA. Pat is a Marketing Representative with IBM and Steve is in teaching. They have two daughters: Tori (4) and Alana (1). E-Mail: s_sexsmi@acad.lvc.edu
Pamela A. Bouton (BS'82) went to dental school in Philadelphia and has set up her practice at 153 Main Street, Owego, NY 13827.
Gail DeFoster (MA'82, Schrier/Starzak)and husband Steve have two children: Ruth (11) and Daniel (9). Steve is still with IBM. Address: 3911 Huntington Lane NW, Rochester, MN 55901.
Kathleen Fallot Marino (BA'82,MS'87, ComSci) works at IBM Endicott in VM software development; her husband, Chuck, is also at IBM. They have two sons: Dean (6) and Kenny (4). Address: 1013 Beechwood Lane, Vestal, NY 13850.
Victoria Riggs (BS'82) is currently with AT&T /Lucent Technologies. E-Mail: vgr@fuwutai.att.com
Mark Schadt (BA'82,MA'85, Lees) and his wife, Rebecca (BA'84) still live in the area. Mark is at IBM-Endicott.
David B. Ettinger (BA'83) completed degrees in both dentistry and medicine and recently moved with his family to take over a surgery practice at United Samaritans Medical Center in Danville, IL. He and his wife Jacqueline have two children: Alexander (7) and Samuel (4). Address: 3141 Golf Circle, Danville, IL 61832.
Scott Gross, MD, (BA'83) did his MD at Stony Brook and a Family Practice Residency at Southside Hospital in Bayshore, NY. He is Board Certified and has a private practice in Northport, NY, on Long Island. He and his wife Wendy have a son Michael (4). E-Mail: sgross@suffolk.lib.ny.us
David Russell (PhD'83, McDuffie) is still at IBM-Endicott. He and his wife Karen, who worked in the department in instructional laboratory support, have three daughters. Address: Lillie Hill Road, Apalachin, NY 13732.
John Bisognano (MA'84, PhD'87) reports on a gathering of alumni he attended last March at the home of Joe Nathishan (PhD'87) and Theresa Rogers Natishan (MS'88). Among those present were Eric Fluhler (PhD'86) and his wife Renee Holmberg Fluhler and their daughter Kristin; Kurt Fluhler was born several months later, in June 1996. Nick Martyak (MA'85) and Maria Judith Rodriguez Martyak (MA'85) were there with their two children, Nicholas and Maria-Elena. Joe presently works as a Project Supervisor at National Starch and Chemical Company in Bridgewater, NJ, and his wife, Yerri, is employed by Merck in Rahway, NJ, as a research chemist. The Fluhlers live in Washingtonville, NY, where Eric is employed by Wyeth-Ayerst as a Unit Leader. Nick Martyak received a PhD in Materials Science from Stevens Institute of Technology and is now employed by ATOCHEM. Judy received a JD degree from St. Louis University and works as a Family Law Attorney in the firm Groff-Martyak. The Martyaks live in Doylestown, PA. John Bisognano received an MD degree from SUNY-Syracuse and is now an Internist and Fellow in Cardiology at the University of Colorado Health Science Center. He is married to Myra Morgan, MD, and lives in Denver. John reports that the outdoor temperature was below zero, and the Natishans served large amounts of baked pork and chicken, as well as an impressive array of vegetables and desserts. Nobody went away hungry (for weeks!).
Elizabeth Kirschner (BS'84) is Associate Editor, Business, in the Northeast for Chemical and Engineering News. Stan Madan and Alistair Lees talked with her when she was an invited speaker on campus for a Women in Science program last year.
Patrick J. Pagano (BA'85) went on to get a PhD in Pharmacology in 1991 at New York Medical College and then did postdoctoral work at Boston University Medical Center on free radical generation in blood vessels. He was appointed Instructor in 1993, received a Grant-in-Aid from the American Heart Association last year, and in March received a F.I.R.S.T award from NIH to study the generation of free radicals in hypertension. He and Eugenia Cifuentes were married in 1994, and their daughter Caterina was born in July 1995. Address: 131 Alpine Terrace, Arlington, MA 02174. E-Mail: ppagano@acs.bu.edu
M. M. Zulu (MS'85, Madan, PhD'88, Lees) is Head of the Chemistry Department of the University of Zululand in South Africa. He has been very active in IUPAC. He visited the campus here last August and gave a seminar at the University of Bologna in Italy on his return trip.
Kaleen Kitay (BA'87) completed her MD in 1991 at the SUNY Health Science Center in Brooklyn and had an Internal Medicine Residency at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia from 1991 to 1994. She is now practicing Internal Medicine in Fairfax, VA, with Novaned Associates. Her husband is Andrew M. Axelrad, MD, Harpur class of '85.
Richard MacQueen (BS'87) went on to get a PhD in Physical Chemistry (1992) from Lehigh and continued on in Lehigh's Corrosion Lab as a post doc until 1995. He is now a research Scientist at Union Camp Corp., Research and Development Division, P.O. Box 3301, Princeton, NJ 08543. He is working on hot-melt adhesives; studying adhesion fundamentals and developing new products. He and Kris S. DeNora of Blairstown, NJ, were married in September 1995. Address: 225 Red School Ln., Apt. N-1, Phillipsburg, NJ 08865. E-Mail: macqueen@ix.netcom.com
Sherry Dudek (BS'90,MAT'92) is still teaching in Mahopac, NY. She is working on the Scope, Sequence and Coordination (SS&C) project for the National Science Teachers Association this year. Next year she will be teaching AP Chemistry. All in all, she's enjoying the field and loving the challenges.
Lorian Hofmann (BS'90) has been employed since July 1990 at Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals as an analytical chemist. She was made Senior Chemist in October of '93. Her project is asthma inhaler robotic testing. She is engaged, and a wedding is planned for the end of 1997. She reports that Michele Harris (still single) and Bill Williams (married) are both at Sandoz and that Carlos Perez (married) is at CIBA-Geigy. Also, Laura Augeri got her PhD from Emory in 1996 in Biochem.-Genetics. Lorian's address: 173 W. Westfield Ave., Apt. 1A, Roselle Park, NJ 07204.
Jeremy Sloan (MS'90, Myers) did a PhD in Materials Science at the University of Cardiff in Wales and is now at the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford doing electron microscopy. E-Mail: JEREMY@server.icl.ox.ac.uk
Margaret Kolodziejczyk (BS'92) wants everyone to know that she and Timothy Harris were married on May 25, 1996 in Brooklyn. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in nutritional epidemiology at UNC, Chapel Hill, while Tim is a 4th year medical student at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville. Until Tim's graduation their address is: 787 Madison Avenue, Charlottesville, VA 22903.
John MacNair (BA'93) is in his 4th year in graduate school at UNC, Chapel Hill. He is working on the development of capillary liquid chromatography at high pressures (up to 150,000 psi). He reports that Paul Schnier (BS'93) is at UC-Berkeley working on his PhD as well. His research involves FTICR Mass Spectrometry of biomolecules. John's address: 216 Conner Dr., Apt #1, Chapel Hill, NC 27514. E-Mail: jmacnair@email.unc.edu
Erik Host-Steen (BS'95) is pursuing an MS in Environmental Engineering at SUNY-Buffalo. His address: 448 Ferguson Road, Freeville, NY 13068. E-Mail: ehh@acsu.buffalo.edu
Erik M. Shapiro (BS'95) is a PhD graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, working with solution and solid-state NMR under Dr. Stanley Opells. He is a Recipient of the University of Pennsylvania Plant Science Institute Graduate Fellowship in Structural and Molecular Genetic Studies. His address: 611 Schullkill Rd., Philadelphia, PA 19103.
Simon Wong (BS'95) was employed at ICN Pharmaceuticals, Inc., with primary duties including formulation of immunoassay diagnostic kits (radioactive). In August of 1996 he was to begin work toward a DDS at Columbia. His address: 146 Redwood Loop, Staten Island, NY 10309.
As of last February Nga T. Voong (BS'96) was unsure whether she would be continuing her studies at UC-Davis or at the University of Oregon. I just checked out WWW and found that she is a Teaching Assistant in Chemistry at the University of California, Davis, CA 95616.
Bruce McDuffie is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. He earned the BA, MA, and PhD degrees from Princeton. After serving on the faculties of Emory University and Washington and Jefferson College, he joined the Harpur College faculty in 1958. He was department chair from 1961-1965, and retired in 1988. He and his wife, Winifred, now live in Chattanooga where this interview was recorded on June 4, 1996. The McDuffie's address: 1601 Edgewood Circle, Chattanooga, TN 37405.
CEM Bruce, you obviously didn't grow up in Binghamton. Where did you grow up?
BMD I was born in Atlanta, Georgia. I went to high school there, lucked out and got a scholarship to Princeton University. My oldest brother was going to Emory University, but I couldn't have afforded to go to Emory at that point. With the scholarship, working in Commons and that sort of thing I was able to get through Princeton. That's the financial part of it. The other part was having to study like hell. Even though Boys High School was a good school, it was like going from a little pond to a big pond. Anyway, I made it. My oldest brother and I both got interested in chemistry because of a high school chemistry teacher, Mr. Hitechew. I had two brothers -I was the youngest - I was "Little McDuffie", always "Little McDuffie". Going to Princeton I got away from both of my brothers, so I was on my own there which was kind of nice. Then in my sophomore year, my oldest brother came there, after a masters at Emory, to do graduate work in chemistry. If I had considered going into English or something like that, I was deterred. I liked chemistry, so that became my major. We graduated together in 1942, he with his PhD and me with my BA.
CEM Now 1942 was in the middle of the war. So what happened?
BMD Most of my college class finished out their senior year, and then a lot of them went into the service, but I took a job that summer as part of an Atomic Energy Project in the Physics Department. They needed a chemist to analyze some of the things they were using to try to separate isotopes. This was the "Isotron" project under Professor Smyth (who wrote the Smyth Report). That was the summer of '42. I had accepted an assistantship in physical chemistry at Cornell that came up in May of my senior year and thought I should go ahead to graduate school. People said it was important to keep the science going - turn out more scientists. So I started at Cornell and almost finished the first semester there. I was about to be drafted from the (downtown!) Atlanta Draft Board and was considering going into the Marines. Then I got this call: they wanted me to come back to Princeton and work on that project again. That's what I did, starting in January of '43. Smyth's project soon got phased out. Lawrence in California with the cyclotron won out on the way to separate isotopes, so I switched over to a project under Dr. Furman of Princeton in Analytical Chemistry. That's where I spent the next three and a half years, then took some courses and finished my Ph.D. in early '47. It was interesting work; we were doing trace analysis.
I had tried to make some carbonyls while I was on Smyth's project. They were looking for a good source for uranium vapors to separate isotopes, compounds that were volatile and non-corrosive. Uranium was thought to be in the same periodic group as tungsten, and molybdenum and tungsten made good carbonyls. I tried using a Grignard-type reagent but didn't have any luck making the uranium hexacarbonyl, probably because it was an actinide element instead of what the others were, group VI elements.
We had one incident where we found cadmium in some uranium samples in our lab at Princeton, sort of a referee lab compared to some out in industry. They got real worried because cadmium is a neutron absorber, and they were trying to make real pure uranium. We ran blanks of course on all our reagents and we couldn't find any cadmium in the blanks, but it turned up in these samples. However, we had missed something. The uranium turnings were shipped under oil because uranium is pyrophoric. To clean the uranium samples we had washed all the oil off with methanol. We finally ran a blank on the methanol and found it contained cadmium, because the methanol came in cans which were cadmium plated (because cadmium prevents corrosion). Apparently the relatively active uranium metal displaced some cadmium from the methanol solution. So that was our big goof. Discovering it was hard but we finally tracked it down.
I worked on electroanalytical methods, polarography and related methods and got my PhD in that.
CEM Is Wini from Atlanta?
BMD She's from a town south of Atlanta, La Grange, GA. My first teaching job was at Emory University, from 1947-1951 (right after Princeton). In 1949 I met Winifred; she was in nursing school getting her RN. We married before she finished, in September of 1950. It's easy to remember my anniversary date.
CEM You were at Emory for how many years?
BMD Four years. Then I got an offer I couldn't refuse at Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, PA, south of Pittsburgh. I was there from 1951-58. When I went there they had a little Master's program, and that's one reason I took the job. That was a men's college in those days, and we taught a lot of pre-meds there. It had been affiliated earlier with Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. I taught analytical chemistry, also some general chemistry, and even taught physical chemistry a couple of years. I learned a heck of a lot of physical chemistry in the process.
We had our three children in Washington, PA: Susan, John, and Judy, in that order. It was kind of a hard time; the salary was relatively low. The area was dirty from coal burning; it was kind of a grubby town. In 1958, when I learned where Binghamton was and learned about Harpur College, I was real glad to go there. It was like coming into the sunshine from being down there in the coal country.
CEM The facilities were not as good at that time were they?
BMD No, we were in improvised facilities in Endicott. They were pre-fab, sort of barrack-type buildings. We had some classes in a regular classroom, but the labs were really marginal - hoods not very good and plumbing that tended to leak. If you had a leak, you could just bore a hole in the floor and let water run out. There was nothing under the floor except cold air in the winter time.
CEM You can hear stories of people sitting in the offices with their overcoats on. Was it that bad?
BMD I've forgotten that part. It was pretty primitive. But there was a lot of camaraderie among the faculty and students there, and we generally ate at the same snack bar at lunch time. Everyone was in the same boat. You got to know one another.
CEM Who was on the faculty at that time?
BMD Martin Paul was chairman and then Max Hull, Joe Berman taught organic, I taught analytical, and we all taught general chemistry.
CEM How much were you involved in planning the new campus?
BMD That was really an exciting time. Let me tell you, before I went to Harpur, I got scared because they were talking of cutting the budgets even in those days; this was in the spring or summer of '58. Before I came there, I called Max Hull who had recruited me. I was worried that they would cut out the graduate program. They had a masters program then. He assured me they were still going to develop, that things weren't that bad. So I threw in my lot with Harpur College. It was a part of the SUNY system by that time. They already had a part of the new campus in '58. They had put the roads up there in Vestal. The gymnasium was under construction, and that was the first building finished there on the new campus. That made some sense as they had no athletic facilities to speak of in Endicott. I think they practiced on the high school basketball court and things like that. Then there was a period of transition when we were having some classes on the new campus but still had labs on the old until Science I was completed. Finally we didn't have to make that bus trip back and forth to have labs. I guess it was around 1961 when Science I was finished. Stan Madan came along in 1959 or 60 and Bruce Norcross came in 1962.
About the time we moved into the first science building on Vestal campus, we knew already that we were going to be a University Center, so we started planning what we would need for a full-fledged graduate program. The first science building had all the sciences in it, a floor each in the north wing for chemistry and physics, geology in the middle of the building, and a floor each for psychology and biology in the other wing. It was a nice building, but before I even got a pencil sharpener up on the wall, we knew we were moving out in a few years. That's about the time that Max Hall became chairman of the science division, and I got the job of being department chairman, I think it was from 1961 to 1965. I was very much involved in planning the chemistry part of the Physical Science building which you still inhabit. That was a lot of work. We were excited to have a chance to plan some new facilities and bigger facilities for our graduate efforts, and we tried to foresee what we would need. We didn't like the idea of the tower; we knew there would be hood problems if you hitched too many hoods on to one blower. We "knocked the tower down" once or twice in the planning process, but it had to be put back up; the architects insisted on it, to balance out the Administration Building tower and, of course, the Library tower in the center. We would get these detailed plans for the building, and we would look and confer about it, put in our suggestions, but almost inevitably, before we could get our suggestions in, they would come out with a new set of plans. You couldn't beat the architects at their own game. It was hard getting what we felt we really needed. One of our battles was that we felt we needed a Chemistry/Physics Library in that building. The decision was made to have a Science Library, but we managed to get that connected to the Physical Science building. That was a good way to go.
As far as decisions we made about the building, the only one that really turned out to be a "no-brainer" was to have DC voltages piped around into the labs for electrochemistry. By the time the building was built, little modular units were available to plug in and get your voltage, anything you wanted to dial up. That was the beginning of really high-grade electronics in electrochemistry.
I feel like we did a pretty good job of getting the space there that we could use, and I guess it's worked out pretty well over the years. We moved into the new building in 1968 (almost 30 years ago!).
CEM For a long time you were the analytical chemist on the faculty.
BMD That's right
CEM Who was the first one to join you in that area?
BMD Gil Janauer came in the winter of 1965. We were on a trimester system then. I was able to take a sabbatical soon after he came. I got four trimesters and a summer so I went off to North Carolina for that sabbatical and Gil took over while I was gone. The two of us worked together for quite a few years. He was a really good enthusiastic analytical chemist and he really helped the program immensely in the years he was there working. It was a long time after that before we got a third analytical chemist. I'd say we were always outvoted at department meetings.
CEM You were saying that in your graduate study you were doing trace analysis by electrochemistry. You continued that as you developed your research program at Binghamton?
BMD I was trying to do some work with mercury cathodes and controlled potential electrolysis and things like that. After being with Reilly at UNC for sabbatical, I came back with the idea of building an electroanalytical instrument so that I could work with thin layer electrodes (two electrodes separated by a small volume of solution, controlled potential electrolysis in scanning, peak voltammetry and that sort of thing). I built a big old rack with stuff for that, but in a few years you could buy a small box that would do the same thing. That's the problem that I've had over the years. You see, I grew up in the Depression and developed some penurious habits of saving stuff and not liking to throw anything out. My psyche wasn't very good at getting the new instruments and just junking the old ones. That always bothered me. Of course we had limited funds most of the years so there was a problem we had in analytical chemistry where these developments came thick and fast, not just in electrochemistry, but in spectrochemistry and later in chromatography. All these new analyzers came along.
In late '69 and early '70 I was beginning to try to develop some electroanalytical methods for environmental pollutants. I was working on a method for sulfur dioxide and other pollutants. You know what happened in 1970 in November: we were analyzing some Chenango River fish for mercury, because people were finding mercury pollution in some of the U. S. rivers particularly up around Detroit, the St. Clair River. Some chlor-alkali plants up there used mercury cathode electrolysis, and a lot of wasted mercury went into the river. So we analyzed some river fish that somebody brought in. By that time we had atomic absorption. The method that was being used then for mercury was to have a quartz window cell and push the vapor through. The mercury atoms in the vapor would absorb the mercury line from an AA lamp, and you would end up getting an absorption peak. Some of the fish were kind of close to the FDA limit of 0.5 ppm, so I wanted to repeat the analyses before we gave them to the paper. At that time an undergraduate by the name of John Haney said, "The only fish I eat is tuna fish, so why don't you analyze the tuna?" So I went home and got a can of Grand Union chunk light tuna, and we did that, along with repeating the river fish. Well the signal from the tuna almost went off the chart! We told the morning paper about it, but Tom Cawley of the Evening Press came around and wanted more information because he could see the significance of it. It hit the fan that the tuna was high in mercury, well above the FDA guidelines. Pretty soon after Tom, the FDA came to check our lab and get a sample of that tuna. That was a rather exciting and busy time. It was an indication that the oceans perhaps weren't as clean as we thought they were, that the food from the ocean might be polluted as well as stuff from the rivers and the land. It hadn't been talked about much that fish in the ocean might be high in mercury. A little bit after we did the tuna we did some swordfish steaks that came out even higher. I understand that swordfish can swim fast enough to catch tuna; they zoom into a school and kill a few of them with their bill and they get a good meal of tuna. Swordfish live quite a while so they get kind of high in mercury. Well that was a wild time. We analyzed people because many Weight Watchers were eating a lot of tuna fish and sometimes swordfish on Sunday. So we analyzed the blood, hair and urine from about 40 Weight Watcher fish eaters and about 25 or so non-fish eaters and you could see a good correlation between the amount of tuna and swordfish they ate and the concentrations of mercury in the blood and hair and urine. It was about that time that we began to realize that the form of mercury in the fish was methyl mercury, an organo-mercury. That was an eye opener for me because, when I studied organometallics in Graduate School, that included things like lead and tin alkyls which weren't stable in air or moisture and were hard to keep. It turns out that the carbon-mercury bond is pretty darn strong and even when you cook the fish it's still methyl mercury. That enables the methyl mercury ion hitched to protein or sulphur somewhere to penetrate the brain better than inorganic mercury would. Also the methyl mercury does stick with you much longer than inorganic mercury. There were two cases in Japan where a lot of people became seriously ill and many died from eating fish that had high concentrations of methyl mercury.
CEM You were involved in a Susquehanna Basin Program of some sort.
BMD You know, the alchemist tried to change mercury into gold. Well I wasn't able to do that and get any big grants to build up a lot of research on mercury, but we just broadened out to include a lot of toxic or heavy metals. We had several grants from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission. The first grant was from the Rockefeller Foundation (that was nice), then from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission. We analyzed a lot of river sediments for heavy metals and later on for PCBs and organic pesticides. We would sample the river at selected points and get a sediment sample. It wasn't easy really; that's kind of rocky territory up here in the Susquehanna River. You can't do like they do in the ocean, or like they do in the Great Lakes, and get a core sample of the bottom sediment. We'd go out in a row boat and scoop around and use a sieve to separate out most of the big stuff and then collect what went through the sieve in a big bucket and let that settle and take it back to the lab and analyze it. I learned some hydrology and already had learned some oceanography when we had to worry about how the mercury got in the ocean and so on and about fish and ocean organisms. So this was geology and hydrology, and I learned about sand, silt and clay and different size fractions of what you get in sediment. We analyzed a lot of samples from upstream near the source of the Susquehanna all the way down past Wilkes-Barre . You could see the increase in heavy metals downstream of all these cities. It was cleaner upstream than downstream. Then we had a chance to analyze before and after one of the hurricanes and flood that came through there (Hurricane Agnes, 1972). We got samples of the sediment before and after from upstream and downstream of Binghamton. This made me realize that the flow of the water and the rocks and sediment and the high water were cleaning out the river channel and washing in new clay. So after the flood the sediment would have a lower concentration of some of the heavy metals, but would be higher in iron which was brought in with the clay samples, some of the aluminosilicates. So that was interesting to me. Ibrahim El-Barbary worked with me on that, a student I had from Egypt. The first electroanalytical chemist I had that got his degree, my first Ph.D., was Stan Konopka. He went on to do well in the analytical lab of Wilson Hospital and then moved on to a position in Tennessee. Greg Hollod was a good student who got his Masters with me on river sediment studies. Bob Tiberio worked with me on the genesis of river sediment. We wanted to see if we could take some soil samples from near the river bank and treat them with synthetic river water (having the same chemical composition that we found in the river), and pretend that we were the river washing this soil as it came in. The real fine stuff would go on downstream to Chesapeake Bay and some of the bigger particles would stay in the sediment. If we washed it enough we ought to have something like you find when you scoop the bottom of the river. We did that, and we made synthetic river sediment that way from soil. It turned out that the analysis of it was quite similar to samples we were getting upstream from Binghamton, not heavily polluted. That was an interesting experiment to see if we could duplicate what nature was doing.
CEM Am I correct in recalling that you had some sort of a conference at Binghamton connected to this Susquehanna River Study?
BMD Right. I wrote a proposal to have a conference on the aquatic environment with emphasis on New York studies. This was one of the SUNY "Conversations in the Disciplines"; I think it may have been one of the first we got. I brought in people from a lot of the neighboring colleges and universities and had a day and a half program with a dinner and so on. We were lucky that we got the fees in ahead of time because there was a snow storm that weekend and a lot of people had to be very resourceful to get there. I think that, if we hadn't received the fees ahead of time, we would have had a very low attendance. That was a successful conference.
CEM You had Paul Figura as one of your students?
BMD Paul was an excellent student. I had a grant to study the disposal of sewage sludge on some farmland up the hill from the sewage plant on Foster Road in Vestal. The sewage plant wanted to find a use for the sludge; it is a good fertilizer. They used it on this farm on the fields where they were cutting hay and growing field corn (to be fed to animals-not for human consumption). We got a grant from the Office of Naval Research to study this process and particularly to study the effect it might have on any streams in the area or the wells that might be around this property. Once again we had to take a lot of samples and do a lot of trace analysis to see the effect. As it turned out, the concentrations of cadmium in the sludge were higher than they had been when we first analyzed some sludge. The Broome County Health Department engaged us to analyze some sludge samples for the toxic metals before they OK'd the project, and cadmium, which was a toxic metal, was low then. In the interim, GAF had put in a purification step for some of their waste which had been going into the Chenango River via an underground creek through the First Ward. They were discharging a fair amount of cadmium. It was a substance that was put in photographic film to keep the grain size smaller so that, particularly in x-ray films, you could see small differences in the intensity. GAF did some treatment of those wastes and then sent the supposedly treated waste to the sewage plant. However, there was still a lot of cadmium in what they sent. That raised the cadmium concentration in the sludge above acceptable limits. We didn't realize that at first. I suppose we should have been analyzing the sludge all along, but we didn't know about this change. When we found out, it was an opportunity to study what was going to happen to the cadmium. We had an experimental garden down on the campus just across the creek on the athletic field. We planted two kinds of corn, field corn and sweet corn, and we also planted tomatoes and something else. It turns out that cadmium is picked up by the sweet corn quite a bit. It's more in the leaves than in the corn. By the way, cadmium is picked up in leafy vegetables like lettuce and Swiss chard, things like that. There was quite a buildup in the leaves of the corn which might have been used for animal fodder. It's not picked up much in field corn. Anyway, we didn't find any alarming data on the contamination of the water supplies around the farm. Paul did his thesis then. He worked out a method for determining the speciation of metals in water samples, as to whether the metal is a free metal ion or complex with some other substance or whether it was in insoluble or particulate matter, colloidal or larger particles. Paul used some chelating resin to partially fractionate a sample for trace metals in water and anodic stripping voltammetry is what was used to actually determine the free metal. It was a pretty successful piece of research that he did, along with many routine analyses that had to be done on this Naval Research sludge project. Another good student along that time was Frank Emmi who went on to take a good job at IBM.
CEM He's still there; he's a manager.
BMD Frank was a real good lab worker. He mostly did organic analyses with me on PCBs and some herbicides using GC and some liquid chromatography. Then Dave Russell came along; he was also a good student and worker. Dave and I studied the phthalate ester pollutants and, in particular, tried to study the extent to which they would migrate with a column of water through soil. We had some success at packing a liquid chromatograph column with a homogeneous soil sample of a certain size fraction, and measuring the time it would take (the retention time) for various phthalates to migrate through this column before you had breakthrough. With a GC or LC, usually you inject a small sample and it comes out as a peak. If you're continually putting through a polluted sample, you observe a breakthrough at some point. The integrated signal would be an S-shaped curve. If you took the derivative of that, it would be a peak. We were able to determine the partition coefficients of certain phthalate esters in soil, and actually you could do those by a batch experiment and then compare that to what you observed through liquid chromatography column. It's difficult though because the ordinary LC column was packed with small spheres, but the soil particles tend to be all sizes and shapes, even if you size fractionate. They tend to pack more and it's hard to set up to do that, but Dave was successful. He still works at IBM.
One of Gil Janauer's good students was Bill Bernier who got more into the management area in IBM. I don't know where he is now.
CEM I believe he's still in town.
BMD For awhile he was over near New York at corporate headquarters. So for about 20 years Gil and I both had a good bunch of students there.
CEM Working on things with some pretty significant implications. You retired in '88? So it was thirty years.
BMD I was there exactly 30 years.
CEM What have you been doing since?
BMD I've been enjoying life in Chattanooga. For a few years I had to go back and forth to Binghamton quite a bit. We didn't sell our house there until October of '93. I must say I feel I was lucky to sell it then because the winters of '93 and '94 were really severe. I used to see Binghamton on the Weather Channel breaking the record snowfall. I see you broke it again this last year. Winifred and I wanted to go back south where our roots were. We looked around Atlanta where I grew up but that's such a huge place now. I didn't want to be driving the beltway every day to do anything. So we settled in Chattanooga which is a mid-sized city and found a house near her aunt and uncle. I can get downtown in five minutes from here and get to any place in the city in 15; so it's really convenient. It's an exciting place to be. There's a lot of development here in terms of tourist attractions and so on. I spend time here volunteering on various environmental projects (like River Rescue Day) and in some inner-city schools where I have taught a little science to some of these kids. Before he was a vice presidential candidate, Senator Gore came through the school and I put on a little demonstration for him and the students. It wasn't chemistry but it was a great demonstration, a simple physics demonstration, which everybody knows about. It's when you fill a glass with water and turn it upside down in a pan of water and you hold it up and the water doesn't run out because it's held in by the air pressure. I made a long plastic tube, over a meter long, and thought I'd try that demonstration with Senator Gore. That worked - he held the tube while I filled it with water. We inverted it, there were a few kids around, and lo and behold the water stayed up in the tube. Of course it would stay up about 30 feet if you had a long enough tube. That's a very illustrative and simple experiment which anybody can show to kids and I guess after a while they believe that there really is air pressure.
Before I left Binghamton, I got interested in running. I was in some road races around town. Actually, I might mention one of the other things I do is I'm a member of a Scottish clan society. We thought it was going to be called Clan McDuffie, but it ends up being called Clan Macfie (Macfie is a corruption of McDuffie, at least I think of it that way). My first race was for the clan society at Grandfather Mountain Highland Games. They needed someone to run the Kilted Mile. I thought I could run a mile. I practiced a few times. Let me tell you, it was a hot day and up a thousand feet. It was four laps around the track, and I had to stop four times and walk before I finished. It took me 10 and a half minutes. When I got back to Binghamton I kept running and did a few local road races. The next year I did the Kilted Mile in 8 1/2 minutes and a couple of years later at 7 minutes and 40 seconds. For several years I got faster. That's what encouraged me to keep on running - I was improving. Along came a triathlon on my birthday in 1984. I did that at Dorchester Park. I could swim and bike, and so I did that OK, but I was tired at the end. Your legs may cramp up. Since then I've done a lot of road races and triathlons and lately some duathlons (usually a run-bike-run event). That's my main hobby I guess. Because I was doing some running, I got some young kids to run at the school. There was a big field in back of the school, and I marked off a 220 track (wasn't big enough for a 440). I practiced some of them up, and they went to a local track meet that another school sponsored, and a lot of the kids won first, second and third place ribbons. That was a real exciting venture. Our school then sponsored a track meet the next few years. So it had some lasting effects. Also, I'm quite interested in some local pollution problems. There's a stream running through Chattanooga called Chattanooga Creek. It comes in from Georgia fairly clean, but it is heavily polluted over in South Chattanooga where a lot of minorities live. South Chattanooga also is where there has been a lot of chemical industry. During World War II they made a lot of coke here for the foundries. Chattanooga was a big manufacturing town in those days. They had a lot of coal tar, a byproduct of making coke, and they dumped a lot of it in the creek, thousands of tons of it apparently, in some places 6 feet deep in coal tar. I'm very much interested in how they're going to clean it up (it turns out to be one of the SuperFund sites). One method that looks promising is to start out by taking this material and subjecting it to "thermal desorption." There's a company in town that's near enough to do that. I think if they could desorb the volatile stuff and burn it or catch it or use it without polluting the air, it would be better than incinerating. What's left over may be used for building roads; it may have some economical usage. It would be wonderful to clean it up in that way. I'm also involved in trying to help develop some greenways around town. There's a big push to do that. There is one along the river, the River Walk, that a lot of people use and enjoy. It's going to be harder to do that in South Chattanooga. We have some ideas, and, with the help from the Trust for Public Lands, these greenways are being developed in three or four areas around the city. We hope there will be some clean industries coming into the area that have zero emissions, and that they'll also provide jobs for some of those people who used to work in the factories which have been closed down lately. You notice in the news that a lot of textile companies are cutting back, as I think the competition from overseas is too tough for textile companies to keep running the mills. So people are being laid off here, but at the same time, we hope that people will be employed in some of these environmentally important industries that are being developed like this thermal desorption company. So I've stayed busy with that and walking my aunt's Dalmatian and things of a more local, personal nature.
CEM Your children?
BMD We still call them children but two of them are in their 40's now and one is 39. Our oldest, Susan, is in Santa Fe. She's an occupational therapist at a school system there. She's happy in Santa Fe. It's a nice place to visit. We get there once a year at least. It's a nice mix of culture, architecture and the arts. Our son John is a guitar player in Los Angeles. He's had a few gigs on the road. The most notorious was with Engelbert Humperdink. He played guitar in Engelbert's 10-man band that he took around with him. That was for a year and a half until Engelbert decided to fire everybody (His voice isn't quite what it used to be). John has a studio that he built in his garage and he's able to make high-quality demonstration tapes and records. He does studio work, but he still has to play some in bars to make ends meet. Our daughter Judy went to Cornell and married a fellow student. He was in the air force and spent a few years in England, so we were able to visit them in England. He's a pilot for Delta now, and they are located near Boston (where he flies from) in Durham, New Hampshire, which is the university town up there. They have three children. We enjoy visiting them and having them visit us. With all of our children so far away, we just don't get to see enough of them and our grandchildren. Aside from that, we're very comfortably situated.
CEM As Lois Mackey used to say, that pretty well "covers the waterfront". Any other comments?
BMD I might just mention again the faculty that I knew so well for the 30 years that I was there. All told, I taught chemistry for 41 years (not counting being an assistant). I was sorry to hear of Martin Paul's recent death. Max Hull was a good steady man to work for, a hard sell. He was very persistent; when he decided to do something, we usually got it done. Gil Janauer, Stan Madan and Bruce Norcross - we had some good times together, some trips to Chicago to ACS meetings and things like that.
AN ADDED NOTE FROM BRUCE: On August 25 of this year I turned 75; on that same day I did the World's Championship Age-Group Triathlon in Cleveland, OH. I managed to catch two other guys in my newly-entered 75-79 age group and won the Gold Medal! Happy Birthday! Afterward I drove to Binghamton and enjoyed two days of reunions with the Janauers, Madans, Heymans, and Alice Penfield. Really enjoyed my return visit.
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Chemistry Newsletter
c/o Professor C. E. Myers
Chemistry Department
Binghamton University (SUNY)
P. O. Box 6016
Binghamton, NY 13902-6016
FAX: (607) 777-4478
E-Mail: CMYERS@binghamton.edu