All in the Family

Many professors like to characterize their lab members as family. But for the past few months, Bruce C. Gibb, a chemistry professor at the University of New Orleans (UNO), has taken that label to a whole new level: Hes been sharing a three-bedroom apartment with his wife, their two-year-old daughter, his postdoc, and one of his students. Luckily, we all get along, he jokes.

Gibbs sense of humor is what keeps him—and the rest of his family—sane these days. He fled New Orleans with his wife, Corinne, and daughter, Naomi, two days before Hurricane Katrina hit the city. After spending four days holed up in a hotel room in central Mississippi, they realized they werent going back to New Orleans anytime soon. The university where he and Corinne worked had been closed indefinitely, and their house in Gentilly Ridge had been made uninhabitable by rising water. Out of options, they found themselves bunking with their neighbors parents in Indiana.

Gibb was deeply concerned about his colleagues and students in the chemistry department. We left early because of our daughter. But I knew that others planned to wait out the storm, either at home or on campus. Many of the departments grad students and postdocs dont own cars, and many have no family in the U.S., he adds.

Although most of the citys phone lines were out of commission and the universitys e-mail system was useless, Gibb managed to contact UNO chemistry professor John B. Wiley. Over the course of a few days, the pair managed to cobble together an e-mail phone tree reaching all 20 of the departments faculty members and 65 of the grad students and postdocs, including all three members of Gibbs own lab. But several people, staff and graduate students, remained missing.

Like many displaced faculty, Gibb was soon inundated with offers of temporary research space and housing from colleagues across the country. He eventually picked the University of Texas, Austin, because of the double welcome from two supramolecular chemists there and because Austin is close—but not too close—to New Orleans. To save money, Gibbs family is sharing an apartment with his postdoc Srinivasan Kannupal and his undergraduate student Justin Dragna, a native of New Orleans.

Gibb, his wife, and Srinivasan are now scrambling to set up shop in the space that UT Austin chemists Jonathan L. Sessler and Eric V. Anslyn have carved out for them. Gibb was lucky to have brought his laptop, and thus much of his data, along when he evacuated. The National Science Foundation is working with him to provide a three-month supplement to his current grant, which he hasnt been able to use because UNOs grant administration office is operating on a skeleton crew. This supplement will allow him to pay Dragna and buy reagents. We wont be firing on all cylinders anytime soon, he says. But anything is better than nothing.

To get through, I try to think of the silver lining in all of this. My undergraduate student is getting to take a broader range of courses at a larger school. And my postdoc is getting some hands-on experience in setting up a lab, which is what he wants to do when he gets back to India.

The experience has taught me to appreciate normality, Gibb adds. Several days after I arrived in Austin, the Journal of Organic Chemistry sent me a paper to proof. To me, this was the first hint that things were starting to return to normal.

In fact, its hard to know when things will return to normal, Gibb admits. Just the fringes of the UNO campus suffered major flooding, and the chemistry building remained dry. But the storms toll on the department is yet to be fully realized, Gibb says. His wife Corinne takes care of the chemistry departments three nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers. Shes been in mourning, Gibb tells C&EN. To function properly, the magnet of an NMR spectrometer needs a constant supply of liquid nitrogen and helium—all of which evaporated when the UNO campus was deserted in the storms wake. As a consequence, the departments three NMRs will require costly and lengthy repair, if not even costlier replacement. Even if we get back in the near future, there might not be much organic chemistry going on, Gibb says. We might not be back to the days of tasting compounds to characterize them, but NMR is so central to the field that research will undoubtedly be impacted.

Although he says hes still hoping to go back to UNO when its slated to open its New Orleans campus in January, Gibb admits that the universitys temporary closure has tempted him to look at job ads in C&EN. The department is in pieces, with displaced students and faculty now scattered across the U.S. and Canada. Where will we live when we get back? What will hold the department together? These are all questions that I just dont know the answer to.