San Francisco National ACS
Meeting
2014
Local Section Activities
The 2014 National Meeting was held August
10-14 in San Francisco, California at the Moscone Center.
The theme was “Chemistry & Global Stewardship.” The
National Meeting was a great opportunity for the two local Bay
Area Sections, our Santa Clara Valley Section (SCVACS) and the
California Section (CalACS), to work together and encourage
member participation. The general co-chairs for the joint
local effort were Lee Latimer of the California Section and
Brittany Westlake of the Santa Clara Valley Section.
Before the National Meeting, the ACS and the
Committee for Community Activities held at Outreach event for
the public. The event was held at the Children’s Discovery
Museum in San Jose on Saturday, August 9 from 10 am until
2 pm. The event was a great opportunity for local children
and families to experience chemistry. Local sections
helped spread the word about the event and reached out to their
membership for volunteers. In addition to the core ACS
sponsored activities, members of the California Section had
additional experiments for the extra-inquisitive visitors on the
roof.
In addition to volunteers for the Outreach
event, the local sections also reached out to local colleges and
universities for student volunteers. This provides a great
opportunity for area students to have a chance to help with and
attend that National Meeting, who otherwise might not be able to
attend.
The local sections also used the National
Meeting as an opportunity to highlight Bay Area chemists and
section award winners. Continuing an activity first done
for the 2010 San Francisco National Meeting, the sections
selected individual local chemists and created posters of their
accomplishments. These posters represent a wide variety of
chemists, from Linus Pauling to Marinda Wu, and offer conference
visitors the chance to see what Bay Area Chemists have
accomplished in research and leadership for ACS. We
also use this as an opportunity to acknowledge the winners of
our local section awards. The posters were displayed in
two locations, one set by the Hospitality Booth and a second set
in the exhibition hall by the Green Chemistry break area.
The Hospitality Booth was another local
section activity at the National Meeting. Local sections
worked together to recruit volunteers to staff the booth and to
provide helpful materials and a small token representative of
San Francisco for visiting chemists. One local section
volunteer, a recent transplant to the Bay Area, even learned a
thing or two from the Booth visitors – that Fortune Cookies were
invented here in San Francisco!
These events are, of course, just a sliver of
ways that our local section members enjoyed the National
Meeting. Countless members attended the meeting and
presented papers and posters. Hosting a National Meeting
in our “home-town” also provides a great opportunity for local
students, who otherwise not be able to travel to attend, the
opportunity to share their research and to meet with other
chemists from all around the world. We cannot wait for the
next meeting in 2017!
--Brittany Westlake
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