Simon Shindler

6/3/2024

These days, when I think about the COVID-19 pandemic (and I try not to), I tend to think of it as something that happened a long time ago. Like me, you might be surprised to hear that the pandemic officially ended in May of last year. More recent than it seems. The effect of the pandemic on student groups like the Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Association (ChEGSA) cannot be overstated. With the flip of a switch, we were suddenly unable to carry out our traditions or hold in-person events. Without these events, and with few incoming students, we struggled to recruit new members. Yet, due to the perseverance of key individuals over the last three years, and tenacious leadership by Chris Klassen, Jesus Baltazar and Kyle Kersey (who served as presidents during the pandemic), ChEGSA adapted and has remained central to the CBE community.

I only mention the pandemic because, to talk about what we did over the past year, I think its important to also understand why it matters. When I took on the honor of serving as the ChEGSA president last May, my primary goal was to continue the work done by Kyle Kersey in bringing back traditions and helping bring up a new generation of leaders in our department to recover from the damage inflicted by lockdown.

Over the last year, I have continually been impressed by this new generation of graduate students, who have (voluntarily and without pay) put in a significant amount of their own time to make ChEGSA successful in our mission over the past year even amidst A-exams, Q-exams and countless research struggles. Hopefully I can share some of how the past year has continued to make ChEGSA central to the unique community of Olin Hall and to our development as graduate students.

Professional Development

Our collaboration with the CBE Industrial Council (CBEIC) was initiated by Kyle Kersey and precipitated a site tour at Air Products in Allentown PA last year. This year, taking over Kyle’s role as the Professional Development Coordinator, Julia Donleavy organized a visit to Corning’s R&D facilities and Diesel plant. We are so grateful to everyone at Corning who made the trip possible and fielded an incessant barrage of probing and insightful questions during the two tours – many of which went unanswered due to concern over intellectual property. Julia will serve as Professional Development Coordinator next year and plans to organize future visits to Corning and other Industry partners.

Graduate Research Symposium

One of our long running traditions is to hold a research symposium, giving an opportunity for Graduate Students to showcase their research through posters and oral presentations. This gives students practice for presenting work at academic conferences and is important for networking with industry. For the second year in a row Fiona Mukherjee has done a phenomenal job organizing the event. The symposium included a full day of impressive oral presentations and a poster session. The keynote address was given by Professor David Gracias on some remarkably futuristic applications of soft robotics coming out of his lab. The event concluded with an awards ceremony at the Johnson Museum where we all celebrated the excellent work presented throughout the day.

ChEGSA Invited Speaker

Each year, ChEGSA has the privilege of inviting a speaker to present at our Monday morning seminar. This year, David Pine, from NYU presented a remarkable story about the effort within his lab to create optical semiconductors from patchy nanoparticles. Unlike most research presentations, which span a few years at most, the work presented in this seminar spanned decades – showing how generations of graduate students contributed incrementally to a truly remarkable result of achieving the desired crystal structure. In a scientific world where flashy and expedient science is everywhere, Professor Pine’s seminar was a reassuring demonstration of how rigorous science builds upon itself to achieve incredible results.

Social Events

The true heart of ChEGSA lies in social events. By bringing the department together, we find a common community to complain, bounce ideas off each other, and relax from research. In September, Preston Holopeter spearheaded a first of its kind paintball event, which was very well received, and wrapped up with an end of Summer BBQ. In addition to biweekly board game nights and periodic movie nights, the fall semester continued with our annual Halloween party and collaborated with DIP to put on a potluck Thanksgiving lunch. Over the spring, we held a CBE paint night and Thai-dye event (tie-dye and Thai food). At the end of the fall semester, we threw down the gauntlet to the biomedical engineers, and challenged them to kickball and yard games but were roundly defeated and suffered great shame. The food was good though.