Breakthroughs in Science

On September 18, the College of Science at OSU held a faculty and staff awards ceremony to recognize excellence in teaching, research or service. The following nine awards were presented:

• Aaron Wolf, Professor, Geosciences – Milton Harris Award in Basic Research

• Peter Clark, Professor, Geosciences – F.A. Gilfillan Memorial Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Science

• Jessica Cardinal, Environmental Sciences – Olaf Boedtker Award for Excellence in Academic Advising

• Mary Fulton, Microbiology – Gladys Valley Exemplary Administrative Support Award

• Indira Rajagopal, Senior Instructor, Biology – Loyd Carter Award for Outstanding and Inspirational Undergraduate Teaching

• Adam Kent, Assistant Professor, Geosciences – Loyd Carter Award for Outstanding and Inspirational Graduate Teaching

• Alix Gitelman, Associate Professor, Statistics – Frederick H. Horne Award for Sustained Excellence in Teaching Science

• Viola Manning, Botany and Plant Pathology – Outstanding Faculty Research Assistant Award

• Viktor Podolskiy, Assistant Professor, Physics – Thomas T. Sugihara Young Faculty Research Award

Hearty congratulations to all!

Talk about a Breakthrough…OSU 27:USC 21

Beavs Win!

We’d like to introduce you to Dr. Vince Remcho. He’s our new Associate Dean in the College of Science–everyone is so glad he succumbed to the wooing of his colleagues and has taken on this new role.

He’ll continue to stay busy as a Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science in our Chemistry Department. (He also holds adjunct appointments in Biochemistry & Biophysics and Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering.)

In all of his free time, Vince is an avid bike commuter. Standard apple-tree kind of thing: his kids have not missed A SINGLE day of bike commuting to school in four years. Not one.

We at Breakthroughs are happy, happy about Vince and we hope you will be, too. Stay tuned for more about (and perhaps from, hint, Vince?) in the future.

Here’s a photo of Vince in his lab. We asked him what he’s up to there… we’ll just quote him because it sounds more natural coming from him:

I am holding a “master”, designed and produced by Myra Koesdjojo (a senior Ph.D. candidate in my group), used for replica molding of a microfluidic or “lab-on-a-chip” device. The master is made using silicon wafer fab technology and consists of a polished silicon wafer onto which a photoresist is spin-coated. The photoresist is then patterned using the piece of equipment I am standing in front of, an IMP SF-100 direct write photolithography system. We then use a thermopneumatic press to transfer the features from the master into plastics such as polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) and polycarbonate (PC), and layer-p to generate complex 3-D fluidic networks. The finished devices are used for multi-step biochemical and environmental analyses and can also be applied to chemical labeling and synthesis operations.

Vince also wanted us to know that the real story in the lab is driven by the students and proudly shared this group photo. Myra Koesdjojo, mentioned above, is third from the left: