I’m on my way to New Orleans for the annual meeting of the Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC). It’s my first time attending this meeting and my first trip to a scientific conference in probably more than a year (even if it’s the fourth conference in about six weeks). I’ll be co-presenting with a colleague from the EPA on “Perspectives of Human Health and Wildlife Systems That Color Strategies for Integrating Humans with the Remainder of the Social-Ecological Landscape.” The session is devoted to decision making that integrates social and ecological knowledge. Our work stems from a project begun two years ago when we began wondering how knowledge about emerging contaminants might be worked into the decision-making process in an environmental-policy setting. This presentation offers us our first opportunity to think about the project, what we’ve done so far, and where we might go from here. Continue Reading »

F=1 in 1987

F=2. This odd-looking equation was the subject of FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog earlier this month, where F represents women sitting on a committee picked by a dean or chairperson. When F=2, that committee has not merely one but two women sitting on it. According to this blog post F=2 makes all the difference compared with F=1, which often denotes the 1 woman as the token woman. In science F=1 or even F=2 is still common—not just on committees. My own experiences as a chemistry major at a small liberal arts college were filled with F=1 classes. The concept of needing more women on a committee, in a department, in a classroom—the concept of critical mass—is one often discussed in the Women in Chemistry Oral History project.

Continue Reading »

The Chemical Heritage Foundation recently held the sixth annual Innovation Day on 14 and 15 September at its conference center and museum in Philadelphia. Jointly sponsored with the Society of Chemical Industry, the event brought together 120 young researchers from industrial research labs across the country to share ideas about critical issues at the intersection of technology and modern society. A highlight of the day occurred at lunch when the Gordon E. Moore Medal was  presented to Emma Parmee of Merck for her work in the discovery of Januvia, the first and only DPP-4 inhibitor approved for the treatment of type-2 diabetes. The program featured several plenary sessions, four breakout groups that allowed more focused presentations and open discussions on areas critical to today’s innovators, and poster sessions where researchers could share and discuss new work coming from their laboratories. Continue Reading »

This summer the Environmental History and Policy Program is hosting three fellows who are conducting research under the umbrella of our larger internal project, “Controlling Chemicals.” It has been a whirlwind experience, and the time is already coming to a close for our first fellow. All of which has prompted me to try and introduce the work they are conducting to the broader world and to reflect on the work they are doing and how it fits into the broader goals of our program. Continue Reading »

One of the ongoing projects in the Center’s Innovation program is the Robert W. Gore Materials Innovation Project. Two years in the making, the first group of white papers has just been published. The on-line and PDF versions can now be found here.

Each of these case studies focuses on a different materials innovation within the past 20 years, covering a diverse range of companies, such as IBM and Rohm and Haas. Authors from each case conducted detailed interviews of the personnel involved with the innovation process and documented their experience. The thoughtful analysis should help readers get a glimpse of the innovation process within the chemical industry and give insights to researchers on how to avoid some of the pitfalls along the long path of materials R&D.

Two additional case studies from this batch will be published shortly, and five new cases from the second batch will be available later this year, so stay tuned.

When I was an intern here at CHF just a few years ago, I compiled a lot of data (dating back to 1931) for the commemorative Gordon Research Conferences publication. Even back then, as I browsed through the mountainous backlog of attendance records and correspondences, one thing stood out to me—the boundaries for professional scientists were pretty clear: academia, industry, or government. Try to do that today, and you’ll get nothing but a headache. What about NGOs? What about university-industry partnerships? And perhaps more and more commonly, what about academics with their own companies?

Continue Reading »