American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting
Rideal bursar Aoife Trant reports from San Francisco, September 2006
 Thanks to a Sir Eric Rideal Travel Bursary, I attended the 232nd American Chemical Society National Meeting in San Francisco, from 10–14 September 2006. My work contributed to the oral presentation given by my PhD supervisor, Dr Chris Baddeley, and I presented a poster entitled ‘Influence of Au on the chiral modification of Ni surfaces’.
I benefited enormously from this conference both scientifically and culturally. The session on ‘Chirality and Enantioselectivity at Surfaces: Structure and Spectroscopy’ was, in my opinion, outstanding, and highly relevant to my PhD research. Almost all the leading research groups in this field were represented. Of particular interest was the talk by Prof. Andrew Gellman (Carnegie Mellon University) on the enantiospecificity of naturally chiral surfaces. In addition, Profs David Sholl (Carnegie Mellon University), Francisco Zaera (University of California, Riverside) and Ed Tysoe ( University of Milwaukee) gave exciting talks on the adsorption of simple chiral molecules on chiral metal surfaces. These four researchers have a collaborative project on surface chirality and between them provided a wealth of information. It was a delight to see Europe’s contributions to this field of research and the highlight was most certainly Prof. Richard Lambert’s (University of Cambridge) enlightened talk on heterogeneously catalysed asymmetric hydrogenation of C=C bonds.
In parallel, a Chemistry Symposium in honour of Prof. Gabor Somorjai ( University of California, Berkeley ) took place. It drew many of the leading scientists in Surface Chemistry. Somorjai opened the symposium with a stimulating talk on catalysis. For my PhD, we have carried out a range of ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) based model studies investigating the structure and composition of ultrathin Ni films and Ni/Au surface alloys on Au {111} using the techniques of scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and medium energy ion scattering (MEIS). Consequently, a number of talks on Au and on STM were helpful to me. Above all, Prof Wayne Goodman (Texas A&M) and Prof Flemming Basenbacher (University of Aarhus) were the most memorable.
The poster presentation gave me the welcome opportunity to meet with other PhD students, and I we had some very useful discussions about possible experiments to carry out in the future.
I immensely enjoyed my time in San Francisco. The city certainly lived up my expectations with its fog, steeply rolling hills, and the mix of Victorian and modern architecture. The Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz Island, the cable cars and Chinatown were all wonderful.
Aoife Trant
University of St Andrews
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