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The Topczewski lab is doing awesome! Two of our members, Amy Ott and Angela Carlson, were recognized at the first departmental seminar. Amy was one of the recipients of a third year Excellence in Graduate Studies Fellowship (the Wayland Noland Fellowship in particular), and Angela was honored for obtaining a 4.0 GPA last year. Wow! Looks like their hard work is paying off (figuratively and literally)!

Congrats again!

For more, see the department story (https://chem.umn.edu/news/department-honors-student-award-and-fellowship-recipients-0).

In collaboration with Market Science (https://marketsci.org/), we went to the state fair to teach kids from all over about how fun chemistry can be! I don't know who had more fun: the kids, the adults, or us volunteers! Overall, we taught over 400 people about ocean acidification, precipitation reactions, catalysis, and how to make slime!To learn more about STEM Day at the state fair, visit http://www.mnstatefair.org/entertainment/special_days_events.html or https://www.facebook.com/MNSTEMDay/

On Saturday, the Topczewski lab once again showed the Midtown Market that chemistry is fun and interesting! Despite the wind, almost 100 people came to learn about ocean acidification, precipitation reactions, catalysis, and how to make slime!

Look at us go! Our JACS paper was written up in Synfacts (https://www.thieme-connect.com/products/ejournals/journal/10.1055/s-00000131)! This has really been a great year for us.

Congratulations to Amy and Charlie, who just got their paper accepted in JACS (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jacs.7b04203)! Hopefully this is a sign of great things to come!

Congratulations to Amy, Mary, and Matt, who all passed their preliminary exams! Now that they're all done with those hoops, here's hoping they get lots of good research done.

Our Chemistry Market Science exhibit was so popular that we got asked back! This time, we went to the Nokomis Farmer's Market. We were so busy though, teaching everyone the joys of chemistry, that we forgot to take pictures. But at least we spread our knowledge and hopefully our love of chemistry.

This year at Market Science, we did our own demonstrations, instead of helping others! We're the only physical science exhibitors at Market Science (*gasp*)! Thank goodness we were there to teach our future scientists that chemistry is obviously the best science! We may have lured almost 200 people to our booth with slime, but they had a fun time learning about ideal gas laws, acid/base chemistry, and ocean acidification. Hopefully we inspired some adults too to realize that chemicals aren't that scary at all (but maybe a little messy).

Prof. T and Amy helped out at Market Science at the Midtown Farmer's Market. Market Science "is a collective of scientists from the University of Minnesota, and around the Twin Cities, sharing science through hands-on learning activities for kids, answering scientific questions for market goers, and creating conversations between researchers and their communities." If you want to learn more about it or get involved, go to https://marketsci.org/ !