By James E. McWilliams

Research on allergens, green chemistry and nanotechnology will be presented among nearly 500 papers at the 60th Southwest Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society, in Fort Worth, Texas, Sept. 29 - Oct. 2. Approximately 750 scientists are expected to attend the meeting at the Fort Worth Plaza Hotel, located at 1701 Commerce St.

Highlights of the meeting include a symposium on the physical-chemical properties of allergens and a symposium that addresses specific aspects of the green chemistry movement, including innovative industrial processes, green manufacturing and related topics. There will also be a session on nanotechnology in bioscience and electronic materials.

The following awards will be presented at the meeting:

• Patrick Cassidy of Texas State University in San Marcos will receive the ACS Southwest Regional Award for his advances in fluoropolymer chemistry.
• Dwan Garrison of Flippin High School, Flippin, Ark., will receive the ACS Southwest Regional High School Chemistry Teaching Award.
• Steven McKnight of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas will receive the W.T. Doherty Award presented by the Society’s Dallas-Fort Worth Section in recognition of his work on chemicals involved in gene regulation.
• James and Virginia Marshall of the University of North Texas in Denton will receive an award for the best paper published last year in the Bulletin of the History of Chemistry. Marshall’s paper argued that Ernest Rutherford, not Ernst Dorn, discovered the element radon.
• Leif Olsen, Kyle Hunt, Lindsey Hall, Ashutosh Misra, William Morrison and Jennifer O’Brien will receive the ACS Industrial Innovations Award for research done at Texas Instruments (TI) in Dallas on a new system for chemical mechanical polishing, resulting in the improvement of TI’s semiconductor chips.

Additional details about the meeting can be found at http://www.swrm.org.

The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 159,000 chemists and chemical engineers. It publishes numerous scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.