Distinguished Women in Science Seminar

Thursday, January 31st and
Friday, February 1st
Professor Mary Beth Williams

This seminar is free and open to the public. All Stanford University Chemistry students are encouraged to attend this special event.

About the seminar:
"Metal-Linked Artificial Peptides: Molecular Wires & Antennas" (Thursday, January 31st)
Complex assemblies of multiple electron donor and acceptor sites that are pre-arranged in geometries to enable long-distance and directional electron transport are critically important functional redox systems for artificial photosynthesis, molecular electronics, and chemical sensing. Our long range aims are to use metal-induced self-assembly of modular artificial peptides to build architectures with these elaborate functions. We use metal-induced recognition of artificial oligopeptide chains to build multimetallic and multifunctional architectures with structures inspired by the DNA double helix. Recognition in our inorganic analogs is dictated by the relative denticity of the artificial bases; for example using Cu (II) coordinative crosslinks the pairs bidentate-bidentate [2 x 2] or tridentate-monodentate [3 x 1] are analogous to A-T and G-C pairs in double-stranded DNA. The resulting double-stranded structures (“inorganic DNA”) are linked by multiple metal centers rather than hydrogen bonding. This seminar will describe a series of these multimetallic oligopeptides, and present recent electron transfer and spectroscopic data that suggests the utility of these architectures as molecular wires and antennas.

"Finding your Tenzing Norgay for the Tenure Landscape" (Friday, February 1st)

About Williams:
Mary Elizabeth Williams is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at The Pennsylvania State University. Professor Williams obtained her Ph. D. in 1999 from the University of North Carolina before moving to Northwestern University for her postdoctoral work. She joined the Department of Chemistry faculty at Penn State in 2001. The Williams research group is broadly interested in making, studying and applying bioinspired inorganic materials to problems ranging from separations and bioanalysis to molecular electronics and photoinduced charge transfer.

Professor Williams has received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and a 3M Untenured Faculty Award, and has been named a Sloan Foundation Fellow and Packard Foundation Fellow. She was recently named the Society for Electroanalytical Chemistry Young Investigator and appointed to the Defense Science Study Group of the Institute for Defense Analysis.

Questions
Please contact Patricia Dwyer at 650-723-4770.