ARCS Pittsburgh Spring 2021 Newsletter

ARCS PITTSBURGH
NEWSLETTER
SPRING 2021
President’s Letter
To my friends in ARCS,
Iwrite this letter with regret for the delay but pleasure at finally publishing this Pittsburgh Chapter Newsletter. I hope that this finds you all safe and well, and perhaps lucky enough to have found a COVID-19 vaccine!
The pandemic has challenged our organization to find new ways of engaging our members, and, frankly, keeping them. Our Membership Committee has done a good job with outreach and contact, and we have maintained membership numbers above 100. Thank you all for your continued commitment.
Programming has been deeply challenging because we cannot have in-person events. For our virtual programming, we have concentrated on our current scholars, as we exist to support them in starting their professional lives in basic scientific research, which is especially needed at this time. We have viewed, listened to,
and chatted with our scholars on Zoom. I hope that you had a chance to attend and participate in those programs. We are also advising you of free scientific programs that may be of interest, so that you may participate in them. The Program Committee is now working on putting together another in-house program. Please stay posted.
The Board passed a DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) statement for our chapter. National ARCS is in the process
of drafting a statement, and our Pittsburgh statement was heavily used as the base for
discussion in the national board’s initial meeting on the topic. Our statement is in this newsletter. We shall next be working on making the statement actionable, so please
let me have any of your ideas.
Some of us have been contacting our Scholar alums to see where they are and what they’re doing. Read about one of them in this issue as well. We will have
a Scholar Alum column in every issue, as well as an update on a current scholar.
Against all odds, we have had a successful year in raising funds to support our Scholars. We shall be able to fund 14 first year scholars in the incoming
21-22 class. Through a combination of Chapter, Named, and Endowed Awards, we will have seven each for CMU and for Pitt. We shall also have our very first
Pitt Endowed Award as one of those awards. Bravo, Ladies!
Please enjoy this newsletter, and, as always, feel free share your questions, ideas, recommendations, and comments with me.
Linda Burke
ARCS Pittsburgh Chapter President
Tfb5650@aol.com
I had the profound pleasure of witnessing the public portion of Scholar Alum Andrew
DeYoung’s doctoral thesis defense on Molecular Dynamics Simulation Studies
of Graphene Oxide Supercapacitators. As I understand it, this is about the ability
of batteries to balance high energy absorption and retention of the energy for a period of time. We can imagine a lot of applications for such work. Read Andrew’s remarkable story in Ann Fromm’s article in this issue.
“
o
We have concentrated n our current scholars,
as we exist to support them in starting their professional lives in basic scientific research, which is especially needed at this time.
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