The 3^rd ACS Taiwan Chapter Graduate Student Conference

May 05 2018 at Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University

Organizer:

ACS Taiwan Chapter

Co-organizers:

Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University

Chinese Chemical Society located at Taipei

Organizing Committee:

Prof. Jye-Shan Yang (Chair, National Taiwan University)

Prof. Ching-Wen Chiu (Co-Chair, National Taiwan University)

Ms. Michelle Liu (Conference secretary, National Taiwan University)

Sponsors:

ACS Chemical Abstracts Service

ACS Publications Division

iGroup Taiwan

Eternal Materials

Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University

Award Selection Committee:

Physical Chemistry Division

Prof. Yuan-Chung Cheng (National Taiwan University)

Prof. Liang-Yan Hsu (Academia Sinica)

Prof. Ming-Kang Tsai (National Taiwan Normal University)

Organic Chemistry Division

Prof. Teruo Shinmyozu (National Taiwan University)

Prof. Shih-Sheng Sun (Academia Sinica)

Prof. Po-Shen Pan (Tamkang University)

Analytical and Bio Chemistry Division

Prof. Wei-Ssu Liao (National Taiwan University)

Prof. Chih-Hsin Chen (Tamkang University)

Prof. Chang-Kang Chiang (National Dong-Hwa University)

Inorganic Chemistry Division

Prof. Kien Voon Kong (National Taiwan University)

Prof. Po-Heng Lin (National Chung Hsing University)

Prof. Yi-Hsin Liu (National Taiwan Normal University)

Statistics:

89 students, 17 professors, 3 representatives of sponsors

Description:

The annual ACS Taiwan Chapter Graduate Student Conference was held on May 5^th 2018, the first Saturday of May. The purpose of the conference is to provide a platform for graduate students from chemical science-related departments or research institutions to practice scientific presentation in English, to encourage collaboration, and to promote chemical research in Taiwan. This year, 89 student participants from 13 universities attended the conference and dedicated 36 oral presentations and 41 posters. To motivate and encourage students, we have also invited 12 professors from 6 research institutions to evaluate student performance on scientific presentation of their research accomplishment.

After the opening remarks by Prof. Jye-Shane Yang, the scientific program began at 9:30 am. 36 students were divided into four parallel sections according to their field of study. Each oral presentation includes 15 minutes of talk and 5 minutes of Q&A. Besides, two one-hour poster sections were combined with the morning and afternoon coffee breaks to foster more relaxed environment for communications. Afterward, two educational plenary lectures were delivered. The 30 minutes lecture from ACS Chemical Abstracts Service on “作研究，不要再靠Google” taught students how to effectively utilize the database. One the other hand, Dr. Marc Anthony from the Academic Writing Education Center at NTU delivered a 90-minutes lecture entitled “From Paper to Podium: Communicative Strategies for Publication and Presentation”. In this lecture, Dr. Anthony summarized presentation strategies that keep the audience engaged, and listed some common mistakes that unattractive speakers tend to make. This lecture is so successful that we had to interrupt the Q&A section to keep the conference on schedule.

The award ceremony was scheduled after the plenary lecture of Dr. Anthony. The referees selected 4 Outstanding Oral Presenters, 8 Excellent Oral Presenters, 4 Outstanding Poster Presenters, and 7 Excellent Poster Presenters out of the 77 student participants. Every awardee received an Award Certificate and gift voucher provided by ACS Taiwan Chapter. In addition, ACS Chemical Abstracts Service also sponsored gifts for 3 Most Popular Posters, which were determined by student voting. Finally, Prof. Yang and Prof. Chiu gave the closing remarks to conclude the successful conference.

In addition to the regular one-day program of the graduate student conference, a special workshop entitled “Chemistry to Multidisciplinary Knowledge: to curate-engage-influence” was held in the afternoon of May 4^th at NTU to kick-start the event. Dr. Woei Fuh Wong, the general manager of consulting of iGroup Singapore, helped students walk through and practice the logic of scientific presentation in this three-hours workshop. In this workshop, students not only listened to the lecture of Dr. Wong, but also got the chance to exercise how to introduce their own research to a wide spectrum of audiences. At the end of the workshop, students were asked to utilize those concepts in designing an eye-catching poster to advertise their research. Since there were only 12 participants, everyone gets the chance to interact with Dr. Wong. Students’ responses to the workshop are all very positive. Therefore, if possible, such pre-conference workshop should be continued next year.

Program & Photos

2016/10/17 (Mon) ~ 21 (Fri)

by Gigi Wu and Tun-Cheng Chien

The 2016 Chemistry Week at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) was organized by the Student Association of Department of Chemistry, NTNU and sponsored by Departments of Chemistry, NTNU and the ACS Taiwan Chapter. The objective of the Chemistry Week was to build awareness of chemistry and promote the value of chemistry in everyday life. The event was supervised by Professor Yi-Hsin Liu (Dept of Chemistry, NTNU) and was projected to demonstrate interesting chemical reactions and provide fundamental chemistry knowledge to gather the science en thusiasts, especially non-science majored students, on campus.

The main theme of the 2016 Chemistry Week was Chemistry Secrete Investigation and was held in the week of 2016/10/17 (Mon)~21 (Fri) at the atrium of Cheng Zheng building at the main campus of NTNU. 25 chemistry-majored students (fresh- man and sophomore years) participated as volunteered staffs to help organize the event and prepare the demonstration and approximately 200 students have stopped by and visited our booth during the week.

Personnel allocation:

Five simple experiments were demonstrated in the event. The experiments are summarized below:

I.DIY Fingerprint developer

Ninhydrin is often used as a stain for developing TLC in the organic laboratory to identify primary and secondary amines. Since it was first used for developing latent fingerprints in 1954, ninhydrin has also become the most common method used to reveal prints on porous surfaces. Nearly all forensics labs use ninhydrin for this purpose. Ninhydrin is cheap, sensitive, and commercially available in disposable spray cans. The developed print is high-contrast purple that is readily visible on most paper backgrounds.         This experiment usually takes about 30 minutes for color development. The procedures include:

1. Fill sprayer with 10% Ninhydrin alcohol solution.
2. Leave fingerprint on a piece of paper.
3. Spray Ninhydrin alcohol solution on the fingerprint.
4. Stick the tape onto the position of fingerprint.
5. Wait for minutes, and the fingerprint appears.

The chemistry behind the experiment can be summarized as the following reactions:

The visitors pressed their fingerprints on paper, and then used ninhydrin to get their own fingerprint development. This reaction really surprised a lot of visitors. Hence, we have the opportunities to introduce this interesting experiment and the principle to more people.

Ninhydrin solution can react with primary and secondary amines. After touching the solution, the fingertips turned purple.

II. Redox Indicator

Redox indicators change their colors at specific potential differences. Indicator compounds must have a reduced and oxidized form with different colors, and the redox process must be reversible.

In experiment A, a ‘blue bottle’ experiment was demonstrated. An alkaline solution of glucose acts as a reducing agent and reduces added methylene blue from a blue to a colorless form. Shaking the solution raises the concentration of oxygen in the mixture and this oxidizes the methylene blue back to its blue form. When the dissolved oxygen has been consumed, the methylene blue is slowly reduced back to its colorless form by the remaining glucose, and the cycle can be repeated many times by further shaking. The cycle can be repeated many times.

In experiment B, indigo carmine was used to replace methylene blue in experiment A. Indigo carmine is very cheap, safe, easily obtained and produces a range of stunning colors. The basic principle is the same as experiment A. However, indigo carmine changes colour from yellow to red, and then to green. These demonstrations can be used to support teaching of redox chemistry, and illustrating aspects of color chemistry.

These experiments take approximately 10-15 minutes. We took the opportunity to explain the roles of oxygen and glucose in the experiments, in which glucose serves as a reducing agent, and oxygen serves as an oxidizing agent.

Blue bottle reaction:

Figure 2. From left to right: Blue bottles: oxidized form and reduced form of methylene blue solution; Traffic Lights: reduced form, the first oxidized form and the second oxidized form of indigo carmine solution

III. Acid-base indicator

Red cabbage contains pigments called anthocyanins which display the purplish color of the red cabbage and become a perfect nature indicator for acid and base. In this experiment, we applied the red cabbage extract as the acid-base indicator in various solutions in different pH, and then observed the changes of color.

Reference:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/chemsea/experiments.php?exp_n=1

IV. DIY Slime

A solution of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) can be made into slime by adding borax solution, which creates crosslinks between polymer chains. In this activity, some interesting properties of the slime are investigated. Visitors were delighted to make the slime in different ratio of borax and polyvinyl alcohol by themselves and glad to understand what happened about this malleable and elastic plaything.

Reference:

http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry/resource/res00000756/pva-polymer-slime

Summary and future perspectives

With the assistance from department faculty and senior students, the staffs were able to conduct the activities successfully. Students in the NTNU main campus are non-Science majored students, mostly from the area of Literature, Social Sciences, Education and Business Management. It is a great opportunity for us to promote the awareness and the knowledge of Chemistry in this special circumstance. Both visitors and the staffs learned lessons from this activity. Especially, the visitors can get hang-on experiences and saw demonstration and explanation of the background knowledge. For us, the staffs, we learned about not only how to cooperate with each other but how to represent clear demonstration. People willing to become teachers in the future can improve their teaching and experimental skills at the same time. We look forward to the same activity next year. All the experience gained in this year would be great beneficial to improve the activity next time.

Photo Gallery

by Tun-Cheng Chien

After the successful student conference last year, 2017 The Second ACS Taiwan Chapter Graduate Student Conference was continued as a tradition of the ACS Tai- wan chapter and was co-organized by Chemical Society Located in Taipei (CSLT), and Departments of Chemistry of both National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). The organizing committee was headed by Chair- person  Professor  Jye-Shane  Yang  (NTU)  and  composed  by  Professors  Tun-Cheng Chien (NTNU), Tsung‐Shing A. Wang (NTU, coordinator for org. chem.), Yi‐Hsin Liu (NTNU, coordinator for inorg. chem.), I‐Ren Lee (NTNU, coordinator for phys. chem.) and Wei‐Ssu Liao (NTU, coordinator for anal. chem.). The conference was held at Department of Chemistry, NTU in Taipei on Sunday May 7, 2017.

The conference was hosted and organized by junior faculty volunteers who also offered the opportunity as scientific mentors and carrier counselors for student participants. The objective of the conference was to provide a forum to bring together outstanding young scholars to practice scientific writing and presentation skills, to promote chemistry research in related areas, and to enhance collaboration. The participants were limited to graduate students from chemical science-related departments or institutes in Taiwan. A total numbers of forty two students submitted the abstracts to participate oral and poster presentations and student volunteers and audiences from NTU and NTNU registered to attend the conference. In addition, the organizing committee invited 12 enthusiastic young scholars/professors to serve as referees and commentators for the students’ presentations to invigorate the conference.

The student conference started with the opening remarks delivered by Prof. J.-S. Yang to welcome all the participants and addressed the establishment and mission of the ACS Taiwan Chapter. Prof. T.-C. Chien introduced all the referees to the audience and explained the guidelines for all the presenters. The conference was held in three parallel sections. Nevertheless, a wide diversity of scientific contents of the interdis- ciplinary chemistry was involved in the conference.

The oral presentations were limited to 15 minutes with additional 3 minutes for taking questions and answering. Twenty five students participated the oral presentation to deliver the speeches in English. Meanwhile, all the poster presenters were requested to make a one-minute quick talk in English with non-stop slideshow to briefly describe the poster contents. Afterwards, the poster section was held in the atrium and seventeen posters were displayed with heated discussions lasted till the end of the session.

Prior to the poster section/coffee break, an industrial section was sponsored by Everlight Chemical Industrial Corp. and was presented by Dr. Wen-Jeng Chen, Head of R&D Center. Everlight Chemical is the leading industrial manufacturer specialized in color/dye chemicals in Taiwan. Meanwhile, they have broad product lines in various specialty chemicals including pharmaceutical and electronic materials. Dr. Chen in- troduced the general situation and prospect of the company and his precious expe- rience in the industrial R&D to the students. The industrial presentation received broad attention from student audience.

After the scientific program completed, all the participants were invited to at- tend two special talks before the award ceremony. The first invited talk was the key- note speech sponsored by iGroup Taiwan and was delivered by Dr. Wei-Yan Miguel Li, Director of Academic Writing Education Center, NTU. The title of Dr. Li’s speech was “Present Your Academic Research Creatively”. She summarized the common mistakes and provided general strategies in scientific presentation based on her teaching ex- perience with Science-majored students. Dr. Li prepared a handout for the students and kindly offered her powerpoint file to the participants. The non-scientific presen- tation has successfully attracted the students’ interest and was great helpful to all the participants.

The conference organized a special lecture given by the recipient of 2016 Excel- lent Oral Presentation Award, Mr. Wei-Chun Liu. Mr. Liu is currently a M.S. student in the Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei. He shared his first attendance to the ACS national meeting with vivid slide shows. His trip to San Fran- cisco meeting was partially sponsored by ACS Taiwan Chapter.

The award ceremony was scheduled at the end of the conference day. A total number of 15 oral presenters were selected for Excellent Oral Presentation and 5 poster presenters were selected for Excellent Poster Presentations. All the awardees received the Award Certificates and gift vouchers sponsored by ACS Taiwan. Finally, Prof. Yang gave the closing remarks to conclude the successful conference.

The ACS Taiwan Chapter initiated the student conference for the students to experience the English-speaking scientific program. The one-day conference was overall successful and will be continuously held annually. The next conference is pro- jected to be held in the first weekend of May, 2018 and we look forward to more graduate students and faculty to participate the event.

Acknowledgment

The organizing committee would like to acknowledge the generous financial supports from ACS Committee on International Activities, ACS Chemical Abstracts Service, Everlight Chemical Industrial Co., iGroup Taiwan, and Bruker Taiwan Co., Ltd., as well as the continuous assistance and support from CSLT, NTU and NTNU.

by Tun-Cheng Chien

2016 The First ACS Taiwan Chapter Graduate Student Conference was co-organized by Chemical Society Located in Taipei (CSLT), and Departments of Chemistry of both National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). The organizing committee was headed by Chairperson Professor Jye-Shane Yang (NTU) and composed by Professors Tun-Cheng Chien (NTNU), Tsung‐Shing A. Wang (NTU, coordinator for org. chem.), Yi‐Hsin Liu (NTNU, coordinator for inorg. chem.), I‐Ren Lee (NTNU, coordinator for phys. chem.) and Wei‐Ssu Liao (NTU, coordinator for anal. chem.). The conference was held at Department of Chemistry, NTU in Taipei on Sunday May 29, 2016.

The conference was hosted and organized by junior faculty volunteers who also offered the opportunity as scientific mentors and carrier counselors for student participants. The objective of the conference was to provide a forum to bring together outstanding young scholars to practice scientific writing and presentation skills, to promote chemistry research in related areas, and to enhance collaboration. The participants were limited to graduate students from chemical science-related departments or institutes in Taiwan. A total numbers of 67 students submitted the abstracts to participate oral and poster presentations and additional 30 students from NTU and NTNU registered to attend the conference. In addition, the organizing committee invited 8 professors to serve as referees and commentators for the students’ presentations to invigorate the conference.

Prof. J.-S. Yang delivered the opening remarks for the conference to welcome all the participants and addressed the establishment of the ACS Taiwan Chapter. Prof. T.-C. Chien introduced all the referees to the audience and explained the guidelines for all the presenters, since this was the first time of the conference. The conference was held in four parallel sections, including org., inorg., phys. and anal. chemistry disciplines. Nevertheless, a wide diversity of science in the context of the interdisciplinary chemistry was included in the conference.

The oral presentations were limited to 15 minutes will additional 3 minutes for taking questions and answering and 29 students participated the oral presentation to deliver the speeches. In addition, all the poster presenters were requested to make a one-minute quick talk with non-stop slideshow to briefly describe the poster contents. Afterwards, the poster section was held in the atrium. 38 posters were displayed with heated discussions lasted till the end of the session.

After the scientific program completed, all the participants were invited to attend two special talks before the award ceremony. The conference organized a special lecture given by the recipient of 2015 SciFinder Future Leaders program, Mr. Ming-Chia Tsai. Mr. Tsai is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry, Fu-Jen Catholic University, Taipei. He shared his experience how the SciFinder assisted his research as well as his first attendance to the ACS meeting sponsored by the program with vivid slide shows. The last presentation in the conference prior to the award ceremony was the keynote speech delivered by Dr. Wei-Yan Miguel Li from Academic Writing Education Center, NTU. The title of Dr. Li’s speech was “Top Five Fatal Mistakes in Academic Writing”. She summarized the common mistakes in English science writing based on her teaching experience with Science-majored students. Dr. Li prepared a handout for the students and kindly offered her powerpoint file to the participants. The non-scientific presentation has successfully attracted the students’ interest and was great helpful to all the participants.

The award ceremony was scheduled at the end of the conference day. A total number of 20 oral presenters were selected for Excellent Oral Presentation and 8 poster presenters were selected for Excellent Poster Presentations. All the awardees received the Award Certificates and gifts sponsored by ACS. In addition, the awardees are eligible for the application of the travel grant for the daily living expense subsidies to the ACS meeting. Finally, Prof. Yang gave the closing remarks by encouraging all the students to continue the excellent work in chemical research.

Delivering a professional presentation in English is no doubt one of the important skills in the globalized scientific society. Nevertheless, a large number of Taiwanese students still obtain less opportunity to expose themselves to the environment to practice their scientific presentation. The ACS Taiwan Chapter, therefore, initiated the student conference for the students to experience the English-speaking scientific program. The one-day conference was overall successful and will be held annually. The next conference is projected to be held in mid-May, 2017 and we would encourage more graduate students to participate the event.

Acknowledgment

The organizing committee would like to acknowledge the generous financial supports from ACS Committee on International Activities, ACS Chemical Abstracts Service, Chitec Technology Co., Ltd. and iGroup Taiwan, as well as the assistance from CSLT, NTU and NTNU.

2015 International Presentation (Jun 12, 2015)

Chemistry Festival:

Magic Show for High School Students by Prof. Tien Song Lin (July 6, 2015)

Co-sponsored activity: Chemistry on the Go

(Project manager: Prof. Bo-Cheng Wang; Liaison Officer: Dr. Hsien-Chang Kao)

(Sponsors: Chemical Society Located in Taipei; Ministry of Science and Technology; ACS Taiwan Chapter)