Our building, Rowland Hall, was dedicated as a National Historic Chemical Landmark by the ACS on April 18th, in recognition of the Nobel Prize-winning work performed there by Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina that identified the role of chlorofluorocarbons in stratospheric ozone loss. A two-day symposium was held at the Beckman Center on April 18th–19th to mark the occasion, featuring distinguished guest speakers from academia, and local AirUCI contributions. Kara and Saswata Roy from Prof. Filipp Furche’s group gave a great joint TED-style presentation explaining how a combination of experiment and theory can provide insights into molecular photochemistry.
On May 12th, we attended the 34th Informal Symposium on Kinetics and Photochemical Processes in the Atmosphere held at UCSD. I gave a talk describing some of our work on the reactions of Criegee intermediates with trace atmospheric gases, Sara presented a poster on the same, and Kara loitered networked. Aside from learning some exciting new science, we also discovered that the tacos at Puesto in La Jolla are excellent.
Finally, we bade a fond farewell to Ben who has moved on to pastures new. This month he begins a post-doctoral position at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, working with Dr. Oliver Gessner and Prof. Steve Leone in the Ultrafast X-Ray Science Laboratory. We wish him all the best in the Bay Area and have no doubt that he will be tremendously successful there.
