Washington, D.C., hosts ACS national meeting

Coinciding with the historic solar eclipse, the 254th ACS National Meeting & Exposition is one that attendees will likely never forget. On Monday afternoon, around the peak of the eclipse, attendees poured out of the Washington, D.C., convention center. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder and smiling ear-to-ear, they donned eclipse glasses and gazed at the sky with anticipation and awe.

Although attendance at the D.C. meeting, which took place Aug. 20–24, did not eclipse the record-breaking attendance in San Francisco in April, attendance was nevertheless strong, with nearly 13,000 attendees.

Programming by 29 technical divisions and five committees highlighted the meeting’s theme, “Chemistry’s Impact on the Global Economy.” Roughly 9,370 papers and 2,720 posters were presented at the meeting. The plenary session featured a talk by Joseph DeSimone of Carbon Inc. and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, on lowering the cost of three-dimensional printing.

Prashant Jain of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, presented The Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry Lecture on the topic of turning photons into chemical bonds. And Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University gave The Fred Kavli Innovations in Chemistry Lecture on using liquid-filled nanostructured materials to make antifouling surfaces.

In society news, the ACS Board of Directors, among other actions at its executive session, approved the advance member registration fee for national meetings held in 2018. The board also approved program funding requests for the ACS Online Course in Laboratory Safety and New Faculty Workshop Series.

At the ACS Council meeting, the Committee on Budget & Finance reported that ACS’s projected 2017 revenues will reach $553 million, which is $26.2 million higher than they were in 2016. Net contributions from operations will reach $25.3 million, and total expenses will reach $527.6 million.

The council voted by a sliver of a margin to reject a petition to permit ACS’s International Chemical Sciences Chapters to receive financial support from the society and to be entitled to representation on the council. The council also rejected a petition to establish a probationary Division of Space Chemistry.