Jimmy Mays, professor in the Department of Chemistry, has been selected to receive the 2009 Southern Chemist Award of the American Chemical Society. The award, sponsored by the Memphis section of the society, acknowledges outstanding achievement in chemistry and scientific contributions that have brought recognition to the South.

Zi-Ling (Ben) Xue, professor of chemistry, with co-researchers Julia K.C. Abbott and Liting Li have fitted the last piece in the chemical puzzle that led to a Nobel Prize in chemistry for Richard Schrock. In a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and covered by Chemical Engineering News, Xue and company confirmed that pentaneopentyltantalum is a precursor compound in the formation of tantalum alkylidene, one of the little known but crucial components in the chemistry of olefin metathesis catalysis. Xue had made a fleeting identification of the substance in his research 14 years ago but just recently confirmed its existence.

William Bradley O’Dell, graduating senior in the College Scholars program, has been accepted into the prestigious NIH-Oxford-Cambridge Scholars Program to work on his doctorate in biochemistry at Cambridge and conduct research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Al Hazari, lecturer in the Department of Chemistry, is a co-author of Misconceptions in Chemistry a book recently published by Springer that is designed to help teachers at all levels to diagnose and cure inaccurate perceptions in chemical education.

The work of three UT researchers was recently featured at the inaugural Tennessee Innovation Conference, sponsored by the Tennessee Technology Development Corporation (TTDC) in Nashville. Dayakar Penumadu, professor and interim head of the Civil & Environmental Engineering department; Jimmy Mays, professor and distinguished scientist in the Chemistry department; and Bill Hamel, professor and head of the Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering department, each demonstrated research projects with great potential for commercialization. The conference highlighted the value of state support of technology-based economic development initiatives.