Awards

Conference Award – vFFF2021

Congratulations to Michael Toney for winning the oral presentation award (and € 500!) presented by PostNova Analytics at the virtual Symposium on Field- and Flow-based Separations 2021. This international conference was jointly hosted by research groups from UC Riverside, Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research, and the Colorado School of Mines. Coinciding with the conference, Michael helped launched a new website for the FFF Steering Board to organize the conference and serve as a platform for community engagement. You can find links to the conference page and research groups below.

Conference Page – https://fffseparation.net/fff2021/

Prof. Zhong of UC Riverside – https://faculty.ucr.edu/~wenwanz/

Prof. Lederer of the IPF – http://www.ipfdd.de/en/organization/departments/institute-of-macromolecular-chemistry/center-macromolecular-structure-analysis/research/polymer-separation-group/

Grant Award from Hamilton Company!

Congratulations to Michael Toney on receiving a grant from the Hamilton Company for $1000 of in-store credit towards the purchase of new equipment for our lab! With this grant we were able to purchase new adjustable pipettes, a calibrated glass injection syringe, and a generous supply of pipette tips. Analytical chemistry can be expensive and tedious work, our new supplies from Hamilton help alleviate those stresses.

ACS RMRM 2020

Congratulations to Christine Plavchak and Michael Toney for winning awards for their flash presentations at the regional ACS conference! Christine won the Elsevier Coordination Chemistry award and Michael the Royal Society of Chemistry Flash Presentation award. Over 160 graduate and undergraduate students from across the Rocky Mountain Region (and beyond!) presented their work at this virtual conference and competition was tough. You can find a record of the wide array of talks presented at the following link: https://www.rmrm2020.com/

W.M. Keck Mentorship Award

There are essential qualities to a great mentor. They should be an expert in their field, a good listener, give constructive criticism, and be engaged. Professor Kim Williams has all of these qualities and more. Above all other aspects, the thing I appreciate most about her mentorship is that she is willing to grow with her mentee. She helps identify strengths for you to leverage and weaknesses to improve upon. At the same time, she is constantly seeking to do the same for herself and does not hide that process from her mentee. This openness shows those with much to prove that everyone, no matter how successful, is fallible and can always better themselves. It is also important to be aware of your progress, so Kim is adamant about setting goals and reflecting on the journey. As a mentee, I gain a profound sense of satisfaction whenever I look back to see all that we have accomplished.

Reading this you may think, of course she does this for her graduate student who she is invested in. But her desire to see others succeed is not limited to her students, in fact this award is for mentorship of faculty and staff. Kim is glad to motivate, advocate for, and support anyone she can. This generosity, combined with her world renown expertise, has placed her in a position of influence which many students and faculty (both at Mines and abroad) have benefited from. Her shining example has inspired generations at Mines so it is no surprise that she has been honored with the W.M. Keck Mentorship Award.

Congratulations Kim!

GRADS Conference 2020

In these extraordinary times our graduate student organized conference had to adapt to a virtual setting. Presentations covered a wide range of important topics from renewable energy to fundamental physics. A list of categories and presentations can be found on the GRADS website (https://gsg.mines.edu/grads/) and videos of the speakers may be streamed on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaf5LvSCVy-ENP195si11JA).

A special congratulations to our group members Christine Plavchak and Elizabeth ‘Lizzy’ Betz who excelled in their divisions. Christine earned 1st place in the Chemistry & Chemical Engineering – Long Form section for her presentation on “Counting biological particles: analytical challenges at the nanoscale” and Lizzy earned an honorable mention for being in the top 12 of over 100 short-form poster presentations!

Please watch presentations on the GRADS YouTube channel to support research at Mines!

Fulbright Scholar Dr. Kim Williams!

Dr. Williams was honored with the Fulbright Scholar Award to conduct research at the Leibniz Institute for Polymer Research in Dresden Germany. She has planned 3 visits with her graduate student William Smith to push the frontiers of thermal field-flow fractionation theory by the analysis of model polymer systems. Watch out for up and coming publications!

Dr. Williams, Billy, and collaborators celebrate their partnership over a fine dinner in Germany.

https://www.cies.org/grantee/kim-williams

Congratulations to the Outstanding Researcher Riley Hansen!

Riley has been named the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher of 2018 for the Department of Chemistry at CSM! We are proud to have this fantastic student working in our lab. Riley first set out to investigate the effects of the various salts and surfactants found in FL-70 (a commonly used detergent used for particle stability and dispersion within solution). His work was incorporated into the presentation talk that our very own Billy Smith presented on at the 19th International Symposium on Field- and Flow-Based Separations (FFF 2018). Billy’s talk received the Student Poster Presentation Award. Riley has since moved to a new project that seeks to separate and characterize two distinct outer membrane vesicle populations (OMVs) found to be excreted by gram-negative bacteria when grown on lignin enriched media (as compared to glucose enriched). These OMV populations may lead to a whole new world in aromatic catabolism.