Thank you to everyone who’s joined us this year. From game night, lectures, and workshops, we appreciate your help in celebrating the diversity within chemistry! We’ve made a brief overview of this year’s events; let us know which ones you attended and any feedback on our Instagram: @uiuc.nobcche.
We hosted yet another successful symposium in honor of St. Elmo Brady. We hope that the weight of history was with everyone that evening as we reflected on the contributions of Black chemists and chemical engineers that enable this moment to occur.
Thank you to Adrian Figg for the keynote lecture and to our undergraduate poster presenters. However, the poster presentation is a competition, so congratulations again to Abike Sholeye for the first-place.
Given the romantic time of year and nature of celebration a “Speed Networking” intermission felt appropriate. Early year graduate students got to mingle with older peers and faculty all in the hopes of making a mentor match.
We had quite a large turnout to all of over events this year. Thanks to member feedback we made a few improvements to some events we would like to highlight. This year we’ve improved our recruitment strategies of volunteers for our “Gradschool application workshop”. We also started hosting general meetings for networking purposes through the “NOBCChE Cafe”.
Dr. Nwabara returned to UIUC with an exciting lecture on developing autonomous green catalysis discovery platforms for hydrogen production. Her works combines the extensive systems knowledge of a chemical engineer with the fundamentals of an electrochemist to meet our growing energy demands.
We are so proud of our very own UIUC NOBCChE alumna and founder for continuing to make waves within the field while giving back to her community.
Of course, let’s not forget about our own outreach endeavors this year. Franklin STEAM Academy invited NOBCChE out to teach their elementary and middle school students some exciting chemistry. For a late summer evening, we figured ice cream would go great with a sprinkle of phase transitions and a dash of thermodynamics.
