Home
    Contact Us
    Organization Chart
    Site Map/Search

The following Committees submitted a written report.

Awards - A. D. English and T. J. Pacansky

Marvel Award Symposium at Spring ACS Meeting
The Carl S. Marvel Creative Polymer Chemistry Award recognizes and encourages accomplishments and/or innovation of unusual merit in the field of basic or applied polymer science by younger scientists. The winner of the 2003 Carl S. Marvel Award is Dr. James L. Hedrick. The award will be presented this week in New Orleans. Previous recipients of this award include Louis J. Fetters, Wayne L. Mattice, Edward L. Thomas, Garth L. Wilkes, Robert S. Langer, David A. Tirrell, Sukant Tripathy, Krizysztof Matyjaszewski, Bruce Novak, Joseph M. DeSimone and Craig J. Hawker. The Dow Chemical Company Foundation sponsors the award.

Actively Seeking Nominations for Flory Education Award and Industrial Polymer Scientist Award
The Paul J. Flory Polymer Education Award recognizes outstanding achievements by an individual in promoting undergraduate and/or graduate polymer education. The deadline for nominations is July 1, 2003. Please refer to the Division website or a recent newsletter for the nomination requirements. The award will be presented during the Spring 2004 ACS Meeting. Previous Recipients: Herman F. Mark, Carl S. Marvel, Paul J. Flory, Maurice Morton, Charles G. Overberger, George B. Butler, Eli M. Pearce, Leo Mandelkern , Eric Baer, Roger Porter, James E. Mark, and U. W. Suter. The DuPont Company sponsors the award.

The Industrial Polymer Science Award recognizes outstanding industrial innovation and creativity in the application of Polymer Science, conducted by individual scientists or research teams. The deadline for nominations is November 1, 2003. Please refer to the Division website or a recent newsletter for the nomination requirements. The award will be presented during the 2004 Fall ACS meeting. Previous awardees include W. H. Mandeville, S. R. Holmes-Farley, A. D. English and Lloyd Robeson. The POLY Industrial Sponsors support this award.

Mark Polymer Chemistry Award Date and Venue Changes
The Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award recognizes outstanding research and leadership in polymer science. Future awards will be presented at the Fall ACS Meetings of odd-numbered years. The next award will be presented at the Fall 2005 ACS Meeting. Nominations are due by November 1, 2004. The nomination requirements are at the division website and will be in future newsletters. Previous recipients of this award include Paul J. Flory, Carl S. Marvel, Maurice L. Huggins, Herman F. Mark, John D. Ferry, Charles G. Overberger, Walter H. Stockmayer, Michael Swarc, E. J. Vandenberg, Harry R. Allcock, James E. McGrath, James Economy, Murray Goodman, Robert Grubbs, Henry K. Hall, Jr., Robert W. Lenz, Leo Mandelkern, Otto Vogl and William J. MacKnight. The Dow Chemical Company Foundation sponsors the award.

Circulation - F. Dammont

We have shipped to library subscribers a total of 365 copies of the PREPRINTS, Vol. 44-1. This number includes 347 hard copy and 18 CD-ROM. Although we have alerted all about the significantly lower price of CD-ROM subscriptions, especially to foreign addresses, library subscribers seemed to be reluctant to changer to the electronic format.

On our recommendation, the printers shipped all hard copy orders to foreign destinations via the USPS M-BAG service. This service reduced by about half our shipping costs, with the same delivery time and the additional superior protection from damage. The circulation office supplied the printers with the required double labels. We are expecting a positive response of the subscribers to the changes.

As usual, we have shipped from Newark, via UPS all multiple orders to agents and all single orders to addresses where we have encountered delivery problems. Although initially more expensive, this service effectively eliminates claims and saves us additional expense.

INTERSOCIETY POLYMER EDUCATION COUNCIL (IPEC) - F. Jones

IPEC (www.uwsp.edu/chemistry/ipec/home.htm) develops and supports the introduction of polymers into the K-12 curricula. Its programs have proven to be an excellent way to interest students in polymers and, more broadly, in science and technology. Students at all levels can relate to polymers. Current IPEC sponsors are the American Chemistry Council/American Plastics Council and the American Chemical Society Divisions of Polymer Chemistry, Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering, and Rubber.

IPEC's biggest activity is the Polymer Ambassadors. The Ambassadors (www.polymerambassadors.org) is a group of about fifteen talented and dedicated classroom teachers, located coast-to-coast. The Ambassadors conduct workshops at regional and national teachers' conventions, where they teach other teachers to use polymers in classroom instruction. During 2002 the Ambassadors presented about 100 workshops to about 4500 teachers, and a similar schedule is planned for 2003. About 30 of the presentations were at national teachers' meetings. The workshops are well attended and well received by the teachers, who, in turn, use the materials in their classes. It is estimated that IPEC has reached well over 500,000 students in this way. In addition, materials developed by the Ambassadors are now freely available on the World Wide Web. Several Ambassadors have received major awards, including National Teacher of the Year Awards. They receive an expense allowance of $3000/year, but no other stipends.

Akron Initiative. In 2002, IPEC formed a partnership with the Akron Global Polymer Academy (AGPA), whose mission is to use synchronous and asynchronous distance learning to support K-12 science instruction. Polymer Ambassadors play an essential role in this partnership since they have unique experience and have developed proven teaching materials. An important element of the project is to integrate the materials with National Science Education Standards and State Standards, since these standards strongly influence selection of curricula topics. Substantial funding for future involvement by IPEC and the Ambassadors with AGPA was sought as part of an eight-figure grant proposal submitted to the National Science Foundation in January, 2003.

Polymer Science of Everyday Things Workshop and Symposium. IPEC organized this workshop in conjunction with the American Chemical Society spring, 2003 meeting, with sponsorship by various elements of the American Chemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and eight companies. Both ACS and RSC have proclaimed it a Presidential Event. The first day is for K-12 teachers. It will be IPEC's pilot effort at synchronous remote learning, with simultaneous sessions in New Orleans and at Akron. K-12 program topics include polymers in athletic shoes, polymers in the kitchen, and body armor. The second day will be a part of the regular ACS meeting, aimed at chemical educators and other interested people. The papers will be published.

Epcot Center Initiative. IPEC offered to work with the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) in building a major display at Disney's Epcot Center near Orlando. This initiative is said to be the largest ever undertaken by SPI. An agreement between Disney and SPI to carry out the project was signed January, 2003. Du Pont and General Electric are lead co-sponsors, and a number of other companies will help underwrite costs. Disney plans to open the exhibit in January, 2004. IPEC is participating in planning meetings.

IPEC also sponsors other workshops for high school teachers. "Discovery in Plastics Processing" is taught annually (except in 2002) at Eastern Michigan University and "PAWs for Polymers," was taught for the first time at Clemson July 15-17, 2002. The EMU program has been highly successful for years; the Clemson program was filled to capacity; and was well received by the teachers. Both workshops will be repeated.

Recruiting new member organizations is a goal. Personnel turnover and a budget crunch at the Society of Plastics Engineers (SPE) led to loss of SPE as an IPEC sponsor. Efforts are underway to persuade SPE to rejoin and to recruit the SPI. While IPEC is seeking major grants, as described above, such grants can not substitute for member funding because they are earmarked for specific projects. Member funding is the flywheel, supporting IPEC's ongoing core activities, especially the Polymer Ambassadors.

IPEC's budget is in satisfactory condition. Detailed financial reports are available to Members in minutes of the semi-annual IPEC Board of Directors meetings.

IPEC could do more if more board members were involved. IPEC would like to add a third board member from each sponsor. Under this plan, each Member organization would still have two votes. With more people involved, more could be accomplished.

The next meeting of the IPEC Board of Directors will be at 10:00 AM Tuesday, March 25, 2003 at the American Chemical Society national meeting in New Orleans, place not yet determined. As always, representatives of member organizations are invited and encouraged to attend. Please e-mail the undersigned for more information if you are interested.

Member-at-Large - H. N. Cheng

The Division is blessed with a hardworking Membership Committee and an outstanding committee chair (Erica Martin). The committee continues its efforts on 3R's (recruitment, retention and recognition) and member communication. Two current initiatives are the Graduate Student Committee and Local Section interactions. The various activities of the committee have been summarized in Erica's report.

Currently the committee consists of nine members. We are pleased to have Janelle Ulik and Kevin Belfield as new members. Pal Arjunan serves as Membership Booth Chair, and Harry Barraza as Student Membership Representative. In addition, Steve Pollack and Jun Wang supply critical membership data. Kathy and Neta in the Business Office provide excellent support on membership matters.

The POLY membership stood at 7844 at the end of 2002. We have done well in recruiting, but retention continues to be a problem. The Membership Committee is taking many actions on recruitment and retention. The ACS data and US Bureau of Labor Statistics both suggest that the employment of polymer chemists will be static for the next 10 years. We need to continue our membership efforts in order not to lose ground.

The last time we did a general membership survey was in 1999. It is time that we should do another survey. A proposed survey (based on Ken Carter's 1999 survey) has been formulated and circulated to the ExComm earlier. Several suggestions have been incorporated in the revised survey (attached).

There are several possibilities of doing the survey. The intention is to minimize (or eliminate) cost.

1. Put it on the POLY web site (as in 1999) and ask the members to access it and respond.

2. Use the POLY list server and provide a link to the web site.

3. Send a mass email to the members with email addresses and provide the web link.

4. Place the survey in the POLY newsletter. The members need to fill out and mail in with their own postage stamps.

Another thought is to write a grant proposal to the ACS, asking for funding to carry out this survey. In any case, we hope to start the survey by early summer.

Membership -E. Martin

The Membership Committee currently consists of the following members:

Member Recruitment

Pal Arjunan has agreed to serve as Membership Booth Chair with the assistance of our new committee member Janelle Ulik. Janelle and Pal will be actively recruiting new members at the POLY table outside the sessions as well as during the Sunday night POLY poster session (as has been done by our committee in yrs past and proven successful). They will set realistic targets for "onsite" recruitment and report session attendance to the executive committee.

As in yrs past, this data was obtained from ACS and letters were sent out to the individuals who were not already members of POLY asking them to join.

Maneesh Bahadur is working on sending out letters to these individuals asking them to reconsider their membership in the Division.

This program is still going strong and is enthusiastically received by our 'partners.' Alan Hopkins has put together a new "permanent" journal display that will be brought to every national meeting and display those publications which have been placing a 'Join POLY' ad for us free of charge. Please stop by this display next to the POLY table and browse through the materials.

Attached to this report is a memo from Alan regarding a proposition to offer POLY members discounted materials from Marcell Dekker. I would appreciate feedback on this item. We will discuss this at the Membership Committee meeting Sun afternoon.

The committee has been asked to design the Spring 2004 jacket - the theme will be the benefits of POLY

A power point slide presentation was debuted during the webcast of the Biennial in Nov 2002. Although this was only used at the start of the program, we would like to continue this in future webcasts and try and incorporate it during all dead time between talks.

We missed the timing for this action after the Boston meeting, we will however be obtaining this data from Oasys after this meeting and sending out email letters to those individuals who are not already members of POLY

With the addition of Jun Wang to our committee as database "manager" we hope to lift the burden off of our Secretary for manipulating and abstracting membership data used in our routine mailings and cross-checks with ACS lists.

Email invitations were sent out to all 1st and 2nd yr members of POLY, as well as to polymer/chemistry depts at various Colleges and Universities inviting these individuals to the Sunday night Award and Recognition Reception at 5-6:30 pm in Convention Center Hall G. Hard copy letters were sent to the 1st and 2nd yr members who did not have email addresses.

The 2nd annual Spring Recognition Event will take place Sunday evening. The 5, 10, 20, and 30 yr anniversary members in 2003 have received a POLY lapel pin in the mail (30 yr = diamond; 20 yr = ruby; 10 yr = sapphire; 5 yr = emerald) along with a "thank you" letter for their appropriate yrs of service and a postcard survey.

· A summary of this initiative will be prepared and submitted to ACS as part of the follow-up to our minigrant award in 2002.

· Thank you to Kathy Linkous for her hard work on this mass mailing and ordering.

There has not been an overwhelming response to this site on the web page. Perhaps we need to advertise it more in the newsletter and list serve? Alan Hopkins is managing the suggestions - he is concerned about "spam" postings.

Thank you to those of you on the POLY board who responded to our "call for speakers" - now we have a more geographically thorough list of polymer-topical speakers to refer to local sections in need. POLY will be cosponsoring a program with the Philadelphia section in November entitled the "Young Faculty and Entrepreneur's Forum"

We are seeking assistance from alternate councilors to take over some of the local section districts. The objective is to serve as a POLY representative and go-to person for the local sections within the particular districts. We simply want to assist them in finding the appropriate resource to involve polymers in their programming and events.

This is going to be our main thrust in 2003. We have a subcommittee which consists of Erica, HN, Harry Barraza and Kevin Belfield with input from Bob Moore and Bill Brittain. The goal is to retain graduate students as members of the Division after graduation. We have several ideas in place and will discuss them in more detail at the Membership Committee meeting Sunday afternoon.

We are beginning at this national meeting with passing out POLY "business" cards to the students at the Sun evening poster session.

Invitations were also sent out to invite the students to the Award and Recognition Reception Sun evening at 5.

We plan to have several items in place for the NY meeting - some preliminary ideas include a travel award, post-poster session reception, POLY posters at SciMixÉ

National Meeting programming - C. Smith and C. Bowman

The Division of Polymer Chemistry will have approximately 725 technical papers on the program of the National Meeting in New Orleans, March 23-27, 2003. These technical papers may be divided into several categories: 251 oral and 167 poster presentations in topical symposia; 40 oral presentations in special award symposia; and 48 oral and 215 poster presentations from general contributions.

Highlights will include:

· 2003 ACS Award in Polymer Chemistry Honoring Maurice S. Brookhart (sponsored by ExxonMobil Chemical Co.)

· 2003 ACS Award in Applied Polymer Science Honoring Lloyd M. Robeson

· 2003 ACS POLY Division Carl S. Marvel Award in Creative Polymer Chemistry Honoring James Hedrick (sponsored by the Dow Chemical Co. Foundation)

· The Polymer Science of Everyday Things (Cosponsored with The Royal Society of Chemistry and Intersociety Polymer Education Council, Division of Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, and Presidential Event)

Symposia will cover a wide range of timely topics of fundamental and applied interest: "Crosslinking Materials and Processes" had very strong interest and will have eight sessions. "Polymeric Surface Modification: Biomedical Applications," cosponsored by BIOT with one tutorial session cosponsored by PMSE, will have three sessions that will be synergistic with a later POLY symposium ("Polymer Brushes: From Synthesis to Functional Microstructures") and a later PMSE symposium ("Polymer Surfaces and Interfaces"). "Structural Determination of Polymers via NMR" and "NMR Spectroscopy of Polymers" are again very strongly represented with eight total sessions. "Polymer Design Using Non-covalent Methods" and "Polymer Brushes: From Synthesis to Functional Microstructures" both represent exceptional and strong symposia that reflect important applications for the future of polymer chemistry while the "Advances in Polycarbonates" received lower levels of interest.

All POLY abstracts and all Polymer Preprints for the New Orleans meeting were collected by the ACS Online Abstract System (OASys). We continue to suggest improvements to ACS who now have a preprint help-line for authors to call. We are continuing to perfect OASys with ACS. No crucial issues occurred for this meeting, other than our deadline for symposium organizers occurring after the Program Chair's preliminary program deadline. This only causes the Program Chair to lock down the number of sessions in each symposium prior to the completion of the work by the symposium organizer, which was found to be a minor issue. The time required for preprint editing and preparation of the final preprint volume has been dramatically reduced, resulting in an ability to have a much later deadline than previously feasible. Additionally, Polymer Preprints Editors and staff played a significant role in reviewing and editing preprint format. This help enabled symposia organizers to focus on the organization and content of their symposia rather than spending large amounts of time on preprint format control and editing. This improvement has helped symposia chairs significantly. Symposium plans for meetings through New York in Fall 2003 are complete, and 2004 meetings are partly scheduled to allow for programming of more timely topics as needed (see http://www.polyacs.org/main/natlmeet.shtml).

The committee aims to insure that symposia cover fundamental subjects in polymer synthesis, characterization and properties on a regular basis, and topics of industrial importance. Suggestions for symposia are welcome at any time. A form is available at the POLY web site showing the information the committee needs to consider a symposium suggestion (hhttp://www.polyacs.org/reports/sympprop.shtml). Call, fax, mail, or e-mail suggestions to one of the program co-chairs, Christopher Bowman or Carrington Smith.

New Program chairs Allan Guymon and Doug Kiserow are being initiated into our process and will transition into action starting by running the Programming Committee Luncheon in New York and performing Programming on Oasys for the Spring 2004 meeting.

Optical Society of America (OSA) - G. Lindsay

The joint symposium with the Optical Society of America (OSA) was held at the ACS Boston meeting last fall ('02), and since POLY hosted the meeting, I assume the Program Committee will be giving an adequate review of it. The only additional thing to report is that this coming fall ('03), the joint ACS/OSA meeting on Organic Thin Films for Photonic Applications will be hosted by OSA and co-located at their annual meeting held in Santa Clara, CA (see http://www.osa.org/).

POLYED - C. Carraher, Jr. and J. Droske

In recent years, POLYED has moved more and more to web-based delivery of our resources. The POLYED web site (www.polyed.org), developed at the POLYED Center at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, has been on-line for more than five years. About three years ago, it was extensively revised and, as with all things on the web, it is due for another update.

At the Fall ACS meeting, updating of the web site was approved and we hope to have the revised web site in place for the Fall, 2003 meeting. A focus of the revisions will be to more directly engage the educational user, mostly teachers, so that the resources that are available are easy to find and the site is user friendly. In addition, particular attention is being placed on the use of meta-tags and other methods for directing search engines to the POLYED web site.

The POLYED web site is linked and accessible from the "new" POLY web site http://www.polyacs.org (under "Education") as well as at the PMSE site, http://membership.acs.org/P/PMSE/ (under "Services").

The current POLYED web site has both text and audio definitions of polymers and macromolecules, examples of natural and synthetic polymers, explanations of entropy effects in rubber, and examples of "Polymers in today's world" which features surgical applications of polymers, composite bike frames and in-line skates, and other general interest illustrations of the use of polymers. In addition, classroom activities for teachers at all levels are available for downloading as Adobe PDF files. More than 15 activities for K-6 classrooms, developed at the MATR ("matter") Institute at UW-SP, currently are available for downloading. Several grades 6 Ð 9 activities are currently on the site and another dozen are being converted to Adobe PDF format for ready downloading. In addition, John Droske at UW-SP currently is working with Tim Corcoran, a local high school teacher and MATR Institute graduate, to edit and extend the high school activities that were developed at the Institute. More than half of those are completed and the remaining activities should be completed this spring. When this is completed, more than thirty polymer activities for K-12 teachers will be available for downloading from the site. These also will be made available for downloading at the IPEC web site. Many of these activities also have been shared with the Polymer Science Learning Center for incorporation into the PSLC web site at the University of Southern Mississippi.

We have chosen to use the Adobe PDF format for the polymer activities on the POLYED server so that the files are downloaded in their entirety. This ensures that teachers receive the entire article, complete with safety guidelines and any other key information. All activities are reviewed by both content experts and grade level teachers to ensure that the materials distributed by POLYED appropriately represent POLY and PMSE.

In a collaboration between the POLYED Center and the Polymer Science Learning Center at the University of Southern Mississippi and funded by the National Science Foundation, experiments suitable for use in college/university polymer science courses are being made available for web delivery. These experiments were developed at UW-SP and have been updated to include links to Macrogalleria, a polymer education resource developed at USM. When completed (Summer, 2003), the experiments will comprise a complete set of laboratory exercises for a one or two semester polymer science laboratory course. The experiments will be downloadable from the PSLC at USM and from the POLYED Center web site at UW-SP, which has links to/from the POLY and PMSE web sites.

The Organic Student Award and the Curriculum Development Award are being offered this year. As decided at the Fall meeting, the Summer Scholarship Program was not offered this year, as it is in the process of being reviewed.

As requested by H.N. Cheng of POLY, POLYED members are being polled to determine if there are any members who would be interested in being ACS tour speakers. To date, no one has come forward but we will continue to inquire about this.

POLYED MEETING

The POLYED meeting will be at the Hilton Riverside, Magnolia, 7:30 AM, Tuesday.

Poly List and Web Pages - F. Blum

There are still about 1400 members on the POLY list. The volume of mail continues to be moderate and the number of complaints is low, almost negligible. Either Ken Carter or I approve postings to the list. This has the effect of removing most nuisance e-mails from the list.

The www pages are now effectively moved to www.polyacs.org since February. As far as I can tell, there have been few problems. If you encounter any, please report them to me. A list of the hits per page since the first of the year is found below. In the last week we averaged 210 visitors and 800 pages viewed per day. The main page gets over 150 hits per day. It is now out-distancing the jobs page.

The number of members who join the Division via the www and register for workshops continues to increase.

The number of members who join the Division via the www and register for workshops continue to increase.

I solicit your help. Please send me things electronically by e-mail for inclusion on the web pages. http://www.polyacs.org

I also request help in soliciting advertising for the web page. Now that the pages are on a commercial site, we have no restrictions as far as the web pages are concerned. It seems logical to do this for the web page, newsletter and Polymer Preprints with a coordinated effort.

Regional Meetings - W. T. Ford

The Division of Polymer Chemistry (POLY) will provide up to $500 to support a well-planned regional meeting symposium. In turn POLY would like the opportunity to advertise its programs and recruit members at a table next to the room where the polymer chemistry sessions are held.

Notice of the opportunity for POLY support has been sent to the Program Chair and/or the General Chair of all 2003 ACS regional meetings. The Middle Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, and Western regional meetings plan polymer symposia.