Laurie Bulter and Tom Stephenson will be organizing Workshops for Undergraduate Chemistry Majors at the Fall ACS meeting in Philadelphia. The focus audience is be senior chemistry majors and nominations are due by Feb. 29, 2008. Based on nominations received from faculty, 25 outstanding undergraduate chemistry students will be selected to participate in a series of student-focused workshops and social events during the Philadelphia meeting.

As the 2008 program chair for the Physical Chemistry Division, Laurie has assembled a dynamic program that touches on many of the most exciting areas in physical chemistry. Because many of the speakers at these symposia assume a depth of understanding of physical chemistry that is not always consistent with the standard one-year sequence that many of our undergraduate students encounter, we will offer tutorials on foundational material prior to selected symposium sessions, and will schedule evening social events and question and answer forums with selected speakers after each day's technical sessions. The list of symposia that we will support in this way is included as part of the attached application. We will also schedule an evening banquet for all of the participants at a Philadelphia restaurant.

With the financial support of the Innovative Projects Fund of the ACS, we are able to pay for the student affiliate registration fee (and student affiliate membership fee, if needed) for the 25 undergraduate participants. We are not able, however, to support transportation, housing or meal costs (except for the program banquet) and ask that as part of the nomination process, your institution commit the funds needed to make student participation possible.

Successful nominees for participation in this program will be chemistry majors who have completed their junior year at the time of the Philadelphia meeting and have completed at least one semester of physical chemistry. Ideally nominees will be planning to spend the summer of 2008 engaged in undergraduate research. The application form, which also details the application procedure and timeline, can be found here.

Questions should be addressed to Tom Stephenson (tstephe1@swarthmore.edu)