Chemistry 20B
Winter 2017

This web site and the syllabus are still (and always) very much under construction and will be updated continuously throughout the semester. Some of the topics, along with associated readings and homeworks will be moved. The assignments for a class are finalized when the date for the lecture is green and underlined.
Here is the syllabus (you may need to hit reload to update it, check the version date)
(You can save the name http://bit.ly/Ch20Bw17Syl to reach it directly.)

Paul Professor Paul S. Weiss
Office: 3041 Young Hall
Phone: (310) 825-0317
E-mail: psw@cnsi.ucla.edu
GChat, WeChat, Instant Messenger: PSWeiss
Office Hours: Tuesday 1030-1130 AM and Thursday 230-330 PM or by appointment
Email: psw@cnsi.ucla.edu

Aministrative Assistant: Ms. Beatriz Becerra
Office: CNSI Main office
E-mail: bea@cnsi.ucla.edu

Paul holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry & biochemistry and of materials science & engineering at UCLA. He received his S.B. and S.M. degrees in chemistry from MIT in 1980 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1986. He was a postdoctoral member of technical staff at Bell Laboratories from 1986-88 and a visiting scientist at IBM Almaden Research Center from 1988-89. He served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences at UCLA from 2009-2014. Before coming to UCLA, he was a distinguished professor of chemistry and physics at Penn State, where he began his academic career in 1989. He was a visiting professor at the University of Washington, Department of Molecular Biotechnology (1996-97) and Kyoto University, Electronic Science and Engineering Department and Venture Business Laboratory (1998 and 2000), and a distinguished visiting professor at the Kavli Nanoscience Institute and the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech (2015). He is a visiting scholar at the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science & Technology and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University (2015-16). He has been named the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) Chaire d'excellence Jacques Beaulieu at the Centre for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications (2016-17) and a Fulbright Specialist for the Czech Repbulic (2017). Weiss was a member of the U.S. National Committee to the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (2000-05).

His interdisciplinary research group includes chemists, physicists, biologists, materials scientists, mathematicians, physicians, electrical and mechanical engineers, and computer scientists. Their work focuses on the ultimate limits of miniaturization, exploring the atomic-scale chemical, physical, optical, mechanical, and electronic properties of surfaces and supramolecular assemblies. He and his students have developed new techniques to expand the applicability and chemical specificity of scanning probe microscopies. They have applied these and other tools to the study of catalysis, self- and directed assembly, and molecular and nanoscale devices. They work to advance nanofabrication down to ever smaller scales and greater chemical specificity in order to operate and to test functional molecular assemblies, and to connect these to the biological and chemical worlds. He is the founding editor-in-chief of ACS Nano (2007-) (Twitter feed). You can see more here or here.

His favorite class to teach is general chemistry. He travels frequently and enjoys adventures friends around the world. He also enjoys cooking, wine, mixology, and photography. When he had more time, he enjoyed skiing, tennis, biking, and backpacking. He is married to and collaborates with neuroscientist Prof. Anne Andrews at UCLA. He has three sons, one of whom is getting a Ph.D. in chemistry (and they have two papers together). Both his parents were mathematicians and one of his brothers got a Ph.D. in chemistry from UCLA.

Our Amazing TAs

Kris Kris Barr
KBarr.TA@gmail.com

Office Hours:
Tuesdays 10 AM - 11 AM, 1067 Young Hall
Fridays 1 - 2 PM, Molecular Science 3114

Kris is an award-winning TA and a fourth year chemistry PhD student in the Weiss group who studies the properties of carbon-gold bonds using scanning tunneling microscopy. He has been able to create stable surfaces with different vibrational properties from thermal annealing. His ultimate goal is to create an ambient photon-coupled scanning tunneling microscope which is capable of simultaneously imaging the topography of surfaces at the sub-Angstrom scale at the vibrational frequency of the molecules on that surface.

Kris spent seven years creating, training, facilitating, and leading educational programs for students of all ages throughout the Disneyland Resort.

Kevin Jason Belling
jasonbelling@gmail.com

Office Hours:
Wednesdays 1-2 PM and 3-4 PM, 3114 Molecular Science

Jason is a first year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and did research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His research interests are associated with the biological applications of nanomaterials. Currently he is assisting on an acoustic wave device to improve the throughput and viability of loading molecules into cells for clinical applications.

Jason was a semi-professional paintball player and trained with the Irish dragon boat team in Singapore.

Dominic Dominic Goronzy
goronzy@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Mondays 11-12, 4222C Young Hall
Wednesdays 11-12, 4222C Young Hall


Dominic is a fourth year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and also did research at Stanford University. He primarily uses scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning tunneling spectroscopy to characterize novel self-assembled monolayers. He probes the interactions between the molecules within the monolayer and the interactions between the monolayer and the environment. In doing so, he hopes to understand the factors that dictate self-assembly and to develop methods of controlling the assembly to tune the chemical, physical, and electronic properties of these surfaces.

Dominic has visited over 25 countries around the world and is fluent in German.

Miles Liv Heidenreich
lheiden@ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Monday 11 AM - 12 PM 4222 Young Hall
Wednesday 11 AM - 12 PM 4222 Young Hall

Liv is originally from Milwaukee, Wisconsin and completed her undergraduate degrees in Chemistry and Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She is a first year graduate student in the Paul Weiss research group and is interested in the development of ultrasensitive and selective nano-detectors for biomolocules with medical applications.

Her hobbies include reading and drawing.

Logan Gail Vinnacombe
vinnacombe@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Monday 2-4 PM 1067 Young Hall

Gail is a first year materials chemistry graduate student in the Weiss Group. She received her B.S. in Chemistry from the University of San Francisco, where she studied mechanisms for intramolecular rearrangements of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at high temperatures. Gail is currently interested in layering boron-carbon cage molecules on metal surfaces to study their properties as semiconductors.

Gail enjoys playing board games, some of her favorites include Battlestar Galactica and Smash-Up.

Shenkai Shenkai Wang
wsk@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Thursdays 3-5 PM, 3114 Molecular Science

Shenkai is a third year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate student at Peking University in China. Using scanning tunneling microscopy, he is able to study the self-assembly of decaboranethiol molecules, a kind of open cage molecule with unique electronic structure that has the potential to connect with interesting functional groups. Shenkai has also been able to insert other molecules in the uniformly distributed defects in the decaborane thiol self-assembled monolayer, which is a promising method leading to 2D materials with heterojunctions at the molecular level.

Shenkai knows the best Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles.
Links from In-Class Announcements

My conversation with Prof. George Whitesides
My conversation with Dr. Lee Hood
All the conversations we have done at ACS Nano

Prof. Chuck Martin sings Love of Chemistry at a club in Gainesville (check the credits)

Prof. Kim Prather's distinguished lecture at 4 PM on 23 January 2017 in the CNSI Auditorium

Stem Cell Symposium, all day 3 February 2017, DeNeve Auditorium

Prof. Jackie Barton's distinguished lecture at 4 PM on 19 April 2017 in the CNSI Auditorium

2 February 2017
psw