Scott McIndoe @mcindoe@qoto.org

Very enjoyable #HonoursFest yesterday with a great showing from the team: Sarah, Tyler and
Tiago all presenting at the UVic Faculty of Science event. Congratulations to all students participating, and well done Tiago
(here with UVic president Kevin Hall) for taking home 2nd prize overall 🎉🎉🎉. Thanks to donors, organizers & judges for a great event

Great night at the #REACH event to celebrate Fraser Hof’s mentorship award. Congratulations, well deserved 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Very fun evening of PowerPoint Karaoke last week with UG student societies ChemSoc and BUGS battling it out for ⁦#UVicScience supremacy. Thanks to presidents Tiago and Freya and fellow judge Peter Constabel (surprise ukulele performance!) and congrats to BUGS for sneaking a narrow W

Another great night out at Hermanns Jazz club for #UVicScience's Cafe Scientifique, this time for Irina Paci's highly interactive & fascinating talk on model chemistry. Philosophy, building molecules, and a ton of audience questions

Latest preprint out: "Competitive Isomerization and Catalyst Decomposition During Ring-Closing Metathesis" from Charlie, Jie, Harmen, Florian, James, Reid, and Allen Oliver https://doi.org/10.26434/chemrxiv-2023-lrg06

Join us at Hermanns Jazz Club
6 pm Wednesday Feb 8 for UVic Science's Café Scientifique, where Irina Paci will be telling us all about “Model Chemistry: From Atoms to Quantum Computers”. Free! Reserve online at https://eventbrite.ca/e/cafe-scientifique-tickets-522858101657 or just show up

Chemistry's photo opportunity day is in Elliott 325 on Thurs 26 January from 2-3:30 pm. Come along for interesting objects to shoot and demos from Charlie Killeen, all welcome, phones are fine, no fancy cameras required

Icy start but a sunny day for a b(h)ike to Mill Hill with Ryan, Dave, and Daniel, who casually spotted about 50 birds I failed to see and was disappointed the only raptor he saw at the top was a bald eagle #highstandards

Thanks to undergraduate Nimrod Rozen for adding to our collection of lab protocols with this video on fume hood safety: https://youtu.be/mEW_bMwou70

Ever wondered why glassblowers wear special (dydimium) glasses when working? They filter out the bright yellow sodium emission - see the difference below as
UVic Chemistry's glassblower Sean Adams is at work

Tomorrow at 10 am PST,
Violeta Iosub and I will be presenting a virtual Chem-ED Virtual Seminar https://cheminst.ca/cic_virtual/chem-ed-seminar-jan-18-2023/ entitled "Visualizing molecules using Augmented Reality (and more)" (the more being physical models). All resources free & open access.

It is of course not a coincidence that the volume difference is 10^24, close to Avogadro’s number! Overall, it’s a fun short accessible teaching moment that can be easily shared with a class. Many thanks to undergraduate Jaspreet Sidhu for her assistance with this project.

It uses a small globe and a 3D printed molecule as props: both differ in scale to us by a factor of 100,000,000, so they have been scaled up or down by 10^8 to bring them to a handheld size.

New #ChemEd paper: “A billion times smaller than us: helping students comprehend the molecular scale” open access at https://doi.org/10.1515/cti-2022-0009. It details an analogy I’ve used with success in first year lectures to convey the immensity of scale differences between us and molecules 1/3

Fantastic UVic Science Café Scientifique talk at Hermanns Jazz club from Fraser Hof last night on A.I.-guided discovery of new antimicrobials, featuring some interventions from ChatGPT, including his 😂 closing statement #thankspal

Welcome to new MSc student Jack Smart , joining us in time for the first group meeting of 2023 - an in-lab reorganization

Join us at #HermannsJazz 6 pm Wednesday Jan 11 for #UVicScience's Café Scientifique, where Fraser Hof will be telling us all about “Overcoming antibiotic resistance: A.I.-guided discovery of new antimicrobials from natural sources” https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cafe-scientifique-tickets-503742295767

First b(h)ike of 2023 on January 1 a favourite: Thetis Lake followed by a visit to the excellent Driftwood tasting room

A last walk in the woods for 2022, over a cloud-shrouded PKOLS

A trek into a closed #UVic yesterday to check on water damage in my lab from a serious flood on the 4th floor (minimal! 😅). Campus looking pretty under an (unusual) thick layer of snow. Unexpected use of the spikes I bought on my recent Banff trip