Kaitlin Luedecke, an Honors major in the Chemistry Department, has been selected to receive a 2020 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF). Selection as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow is a highly significant national accomplishment; recipients constitute an elite group of fellows who have gone on to distinguished careers in STEM or STEM education. This award reflects Ms. Luedecke's outstanding academic achievement and commitment to pursuing a career in the STEM fields.

Single-use plastics plague our oceans as landfills overflow and waste is mismanaged. Jambeck et al estimated that only 30% of all plastic ever produced are currently in use, and in 2015 only 9% was recycled.[1] The packaging and single-use plastics industry are two main contributors to this ever increasing amount of plastic production and pollution.

Professor Henry F. Schaefer (Director of the Center for Computational Quantum Chemistry at UGA) is the recipient of the 2019 Southern Chemist Award. This award honors outstanding researchers who are U.S. citizens, have worked in the South for at least 10 years, have actively participated in ACS events, and have brought unusual recognition to the South through their activities and accomplishments. UGA Chemistry Professor Gregory H. Robinson received the 1998 Southern Chemist Award.

Comprehensive redesign and implementation of an organic chemistry curriculum is a complex and multi-faceted undertaking. All revisions must sustain academic rigor and support continuing modifications. Unfortunately, external metrics designed to measure the success of comprehensive curriculum changes are uncommon or only marginally helpful. Our unique metrics developed in conjunction with curriculum redesign will be discussed.

Stacking interactions, which are roughly parallel face-to-face interactions between planar π-systems, play important roles in chemical and biochemical systems. Our ability to predict and rationally tune the strength of these interactions is important in everything from the design of new organic materials and catalysts to structure-based drug design. I will discuss our decade-long effort to develop quantitative and qualitative models of stacking interactions, with a particular focus on those interactions occurring in drug binding sites.

A grant of nearly $1 million from the National Science Foundation, with additional funding provided by UGA's Office of Research and the Georgia Research Alliance, will bring a new electron microscope—the only one of its kind in Georgia—to the UGA campus.

Polarized Optical Microscopy (POM) is a technique used to quantitatively and qualitatively characterize birefringent samples. Image contrast arises from the optically anisotropic samples interacting with plane polarized light to produce two individual, perpendicular wave components. POM is commonly used to study crystalline morphology in plastics and composites, as well as to visualize fundamental polymer orientations and crystallization phenomena.