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PACIFIC SOUTHWEST ASSOCIATION OF CHEMISTRY TEACHERS OFFICERS FOR 1951
T H E Pacific Southwest Association of Chemistry Teachers elected the followingofficers for the year 1951: L. Reed Brantley, President; Blanche Bobbitt, Secretary; Richard Wistar, Treasurer. These succeed the first officers of this Association, Arthur Furst, Valerie Phillips, and Claude Merzhacher, who held the officesof President, Secretary, and Treasurer during 1950. The Vice-presidents of the Association are the Chairmen of the local divisions, whose elections have been previously announced, J. Robert Harper for the Southern California Section and H. Murray Clark for the Northern California Section.
California Institute of Technology, where he did his graduate work under A. A. Noyes and A. 0. Beckman. Smce then his research interests have ranged from high temperature equilibrium to fluorine chemistry and the adhesion of organic coatings to nonferrous metal surfaces. I n addition to his teaching and administrational duties, Dr. Brantley is also an active member of many professional organizations, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sigma Xi, and the Electrochemical Society. He is a Pacific District Councilor of Alpha Chi Sigma and past president of its Los Aneeles Cha~ter. He served as the Chairman of the southern &lifornia Section of the American Chemical Society in 194748, and is still a Councillor for this Section. Recently he was appointed to the A. C. S. Standing Committee on Chemical Education by President N. H. Furman. From the beginning, Dr. Brantley has been closely connected with the Pacific Southwest Association of Chemistry Teachers. At the San Francisco A. C. S. Meeting in March, 1949, he took a prominent part in organizing the group called by Dr. Otto Smith for the purpose of initiating a chemistry teachers' association on the west coast. At that meeting he was made temporary chairman of the southwest group and given the responsibility of drawing up the constitution and bylaws for the new organization. For the accomplishment of this task, he formed committees among southern California teachers, and in November of 1949, presented the results of his work at the First Annual Meeting of the Association in San Francisco. During the following year, Dr. Brantley was Chairman of the Southern California Section and Vice-president of the Association. Even while away on his sabbatical leave last semester, Dr. Brantley still found time to advance the interests of the PSACT. At Washington he stopped at the A. C. S. Office to give Secretary A. H. Emery an account of the growth of the Association. At Oherlin College he interviewed Dr. J. Arthur Campbell, Chairman of the Division of Chemical Education, about the relationship between the PSACT and that division. He visited Dr. Otto Smith a~~t Oklahoma Aericultural and IMechanical ~ ~ College t o discuss the progress of the Association with the man whose vision saw the need for such an organization. Blanche G. Bobhitt, new Secretary of the PSACT, is the Supervisor of Science in the Senior High Education Division of the Los Angeles City School District. Dr Bobhitt obtained a Ph.D. in biochemistry in 1941 from ~
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L. Reed Brantley, new President of the Pacific Southwest Association of Chemistry Teachers, is the Chairman of the Chemistry Department at Occidental College, Los Angeles. Dr. Brantley has been a t Occidental since he obtained his Ph.D. in 1930 from the
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in the activities of the Pacific Southwest Association of Chemistry Teachers. Before her election as the Association Secretary, she had been the Secretary of the Southern California Section since its foundation. Richard Wistar, Treasurer of the PSACT for 1951, is Professor of Chemistry at Mills College in Oakland, California. He came to Mills College in 1939 immediately after obtaining his Ph.D. from Harvard University in the field of physical organic chemistry. His research interests are in reaction kinetics and the mechanism of organic reactions. In 1949 Dr. Wistar was the Chairman of the California Section of the American Chemical Society, and shouldered the responsibility of the host section for the National Meet,ing in San Francisco that year.
the University of Southern California, where she worked on vitamins and liver glycogen changes. She taught chemistry and physics in Los Angeles high schools from 1927, with intermissions for graduate work, until her supervisoxy assignment in 1945. In addition to being an active member of the American Chemical Societv. the National Science Teachers Association, the ~ssbhiationof Physics Teachers, and the California State Council of Mathematics, Dr. Bobbitt belongs to Iota Sigma Phi, Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Xi, Phi Sigma, and Delta Kappa Gamma, all honorary societies representing high achievement in some field of intellectual endeavor. She has many publications in the fields of biochemistry and education; she is an abstractor for the Biological Abstracts, and the author of some timely booklets, "The S in UNESCO" and "Atomic Energy and You." Dr. Bobbitt has also participated from the beginning
Currently Dr. Wistar is organizing a review service of the audio-visual aids for chemistry teachers. I t is to consist of reviews of films to be published in the JOURNAL OF CIIEMICAL E D U C ~ T I Owhich N, will aid the teacher in selecting and ordering useful films without waste of valuable time. It is of interest that this project grew out of a paper he gave a t the First Annual Meeting of the PSACT on the need of critical evaluations of the individual chemical films.
