industry ties - C&EN Global

Nov 7, 2010 - Purdue chemists felt a need for a formal organization to coordinate department-industry interactions. Also, Baitinger notes, a number of...
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Education Selection of the U.S. team participants began last winter and involved at least 5000 high school chemistry students, roughly twice the number who participated in the competition last year. The U.S. team is sponsored by the American Chemical Society, and initial selection of competitors is made by ACS local sections, almost half of which participated this year. Each section can designate at least five students to take a nationwide exam prepared by ACS, and larger local sections can name up to 13 sudents. Each local section is free to select its students any way it chooses. Altogether, some 500 students took the national exam last April. Based on the exam scores, 20 students were selected to spend two weeks at a chemistry study camp at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs in June. The four-person U.S. team was chosen from the study camp participants. Participation in the olympiad is a valuable experience for all involved, says Mary Beth Key, a chemistry teacher at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, D.C., who was one of the two adult mentors accompanying the students to Bratislava. The students make contact with their peers from throughout the U.S. and around the world. Once they arrived in Czechoslovakia, the U.S. students were rarely to be found together, she says, but chose to spend their time making friends with members of other national delegations. There are opportunities for informal exchanges of goodwill, such as an informal party for the teams of the U.S. and the Netherlands given by the students from the U.S.S.R. "The valuable part for me was the chance to meet the other people," Rickert says. "I don't really need to go to Europe to take a test." For Key, and for Michael D. Hampton, an analytical chemistry professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando who headed the U.S. delegation, participation provided a valuable opportunity to exchange ideas about chemical education with educators from many different countries. "I learned a lot," Key says. Rebecca Rawls, Washington 24

July 29, 1985 C&EN

Purdue program enhances academe/industry ties "We understand industry a lot better than we did five years ago—and our students do, too." That's how William E. Baitinger, director of the Purdue University chemistry department's Industrial Associates Program (IAP), assesses the benefits the program has provided. University chemistry departments traditionally have had dealings with chemical companies and other industries, but the relationships typically have been pretty much on an ad hoc basis. Purdue chemists felt a need for a formal organization to coordinate department-industry interactions. Also, Baitinger notes, a number of companies had provided generous financial assistance over the years; it seemed desirable to recognize those contributions and to provide benefits in return. So, in 1981, IAP was established. Now that IAP is winding up its fifth year of operation, Baitinger says that the experiment has been a success. Member companies have come and gone, according to their needs. Currently, eight companies—Dow Chemical, Du Pont, Eastman Kodak, Eli Lilly, Finnigan, IBM, HewlettPackard, and Monsanto Agricultural Products—comprise the active membership. R. Graham Cooks, the Purdue mass spectroscopist who chairs the department's industrial cooperation committee, says IAP

can't properly handle more than a dozen or so companies, but there's still room for a few more. The main goal of the program, Cooks says, is "to enhance our and industry's research capabilities." The emphasis is on establishing parallel academic-industrial relationships similar to the ones that already exist between academic laboratories. "If you're just interested in raising money, this probably isn't the way to go," Baitinger adds. "We want to develop long-term interactions." Baitinger and Cooks stress that the program is intended to be one of mutual benefit. Industry members gain inside knowledge of the people and the work going on at Purdue, as well as "the inside track" in recruiting promising graduate students. Industry scientists benefit from the stimulation of returning to the academic environment. Conversely, Purdue chemists benefit from the contacts established in industry. Graduate students, having the advantage of working closely with industrial scientists, come to appreciate the industry perspective. School and company both benefit from collaborative research on topics of common interest. Member companies pay $25,000 annually to participate in the program. Of that amount, at least $5000 goes to support the chemistry de-

Purdue's Baitinger (left) and Cooks stress mutual benefit of program

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Education partment's general program. However, all or part of the remaining $20,000 may be designated for specific purposes, according to the company's needs and wishes: to carry out collaborative research projects, to support graduate research fellowships, or to provide training programs in chemical instrumentation for company employees. If the company opts for a $20,000 collaborative research award—and most take that option-—$12,000 to $15,000 goes to support a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow working on a basic research project of mutual interest to the company and the departmental research laboratory. The remainder is a free grant to the laboratory to cover other costs of the research. In one recently completed project, for example, Eastman Kodak scientist Richard A. Landholm worked with Purdue professor Dale W. Margerum and graduate student Joanna Hinton on studies of the charge transfer photochemistry of copper(III) and nickel(IH) peptide complexes. Landholm notes that the topic, although not directly related to current product development efforts, is of long-term interest to the company. Cooks points out that to keep the program fresh, the formal collaboration between particular industrial and academic chemists is limited to two years. However, the relationships, once established, tend to persist. For example, Margerum still serves as a consultant to Kodak, even though the project has officially ended. Now Kodak is supporting associate professor Michael J. Weaver and graduate student Dennis Corrigan in a new project dealing with applications of surface Raman and infrared spectroscopy to the structural and dynamic characterization of silver interfaces. The Kodak collaborator, research chemist E. Steven Brandt, notes that "Mike [Weaver] and I have strongly overlapping interests in that field. He has a lot of theoretical expertise, while I'm primarily interested in applications. We hope to blend those two approaches into a mutually profitable interaction." So far, Hewlett-Packard has been

the first company to ask for a training program instead of a collaborative research project. The company sent 25 employees—mostly salespeople, and all with at least a B.S. in chemistry—to West Lafayette for an intensive two-week course in modern instrumentation. Some 12 Purdue faculty members presented the instruction, which included laboratory as well as classroom sessions. Baitinger notes that Purdue doesn't claim to have invented short courses. However, he says, this one was designed in close cooperation with Hewlett-Packard, to meet its specific needs. For example, although the course was comprehensive, it put special emphasis on fields that the company isn't directly involved in, such as nuclear magnetic resonance, electrochemistry, and surface analysis, rather than on chromatography and diode-array spectrometry, the mainstays of the company's instrument business. IAP is changing as it goes along, ,Cooks notes. For example, when the program started, associates also were offered the option of supporting summer institutes for high school chemistry teachers or chemistry demonstrations at high schools. However, that option found no takers. Companies may support undergraduate education generously with their philanthropic budgets, Cooks says, but they're just not interested in supporting it with their operational budgets. "We've had most success in one-on-one relationships, research group to research group," he observes. A new IAP effort aims at setting up a sort of "Industrial Extension Service," analogous to the service that agricultural schools now provide to farmers. This likely will entail less than full associate status. Instead, Cooks says, it will cater mostly to smaller companies with technical problems, "who don't know where to go for help." For example, an Indiana company making electrical testing equipment was having "a plastics problem." Baitinger found the needed expertise within the Purdue chemistry faculty, and the company's problem was solved. Ward Worthy, Chicago

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