Chemistry 20B
Winter 2016

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/Ch20Bw16Syl 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: Drop in 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 Jacques­Beaulieu at the Centre for Energy, Materials and Telecommunications (2016-17) 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:
Wednesdays 11 AM - 12 noon, 6096 Young Hall
Fridays 1 - 2 PM, 6096 Young Hall - updated

Kris is a third year chemistry PhD student 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 Kevin Cheung
kevincheung@ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Thursdays 10 AM - 12 noon, 4222B Young Hall

Kevin is a second year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at UCSB and was also a visiting researcher at the Department of Materials at Oxford University. Kevin's research involves elucidating the fundamental properties of a new ultrathin gold material fabricated by chemical lift-off lithography, a soft lithographic technique pioneered by the Weiss group. Currently he is studying the influence of these gold species on nearby fluorescent dye molecules. Probing the properties of this new material may lead to potential flexible transparent biological and electronic device applications.

Kevin's favorite comic book super hero is Hal Jordan, the Green Lantern.

Dominic Dominic Goronzy
goronzy@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Mondays 2-3 PM, 4222B Young Hall
Thurdays 2-3 PM, 4222B Young Hall


Dominic is a third year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley and also did research at Stanford University. He primarily usedscanning 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 Miles Silverman
miles@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Wednesdays 10 AM - 12 noon, 4222A Young Hall

Miles is a PhD student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University double majoring in chemistry and mathematics, and also did research at MIT. His research utilizes the power of scanning probe microscopy to image single biomolecules, with the goal of identifying structure-function relationships. Combining scanning tunneling microscopy with single-molecule polarizability measurements he is able to extract physical and chemical information from peptides simultaneously.

Miles is a homebrewer and brewed over 20 gallons of beer this past year.

Logan Logan Stewart
logan@chem.ucla.edu

Office Hours:
Mondays 2-3 PM, 4222C Young Hall
Thurdays 2-3 PM, 4222C Young Hall

Logan is a PhD student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate at UCSB and also did research at Caltech. Using surface chemistry and self assembly, he is able to manipulate nanomaterials hierarchically. Using scanning probe microscopy, solution characterization, and electron microscopy, he studies a variety of surface-dominant interactions. Short term and long term goals in the group vary from fundamental studies of self-assembled monomers to the development of solution-processing techniques for printable electronics. He is also the current laboratory safety manager for the Paul Weiss Group.

Logan has gone SCUBA diving off all the channel islands except Catalina.

Shenkai Shenkai Wang
wsk@chem.ucla.edu

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

Shenkai is a second year graduate student in the Weiss group. He was an undergraduate student at Peking University in China. Using the scanning tunneling microscopy, he is able to study the self-assembly of decaborane thiol molecules, a kind of open cage molecules 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 know the best Chinese restaurants in Los Angeles.
Links from In-Class Announcements

Academic Advancement Program Peer Learning
from Tiana Baghdikian (Bioengineering '17), ttbaghdikian@ucla.edu
Website: http://www.aap.ucla.edu/programs/peer-learning/peer-learning-on-line-sign-ups/

Society of Women Engineers
from Renee Krieger (MatSci '17)
An evening with industry
Website: http://www.seas.ucla.edu/swe/events/ewi/
Facebook page: tinyurl.com/EWIFB

26 January 2016
psw