Do you believe?

While walking around the ACS meeting I have had a number of conversations with members about "sustainability". One frequent question is "Do you really believe in sustainability/will it amount to anything?" The answer for me is an absolute 'yes' as I truly believe that embracing sustainability will drive us to completely new, exciting places--challenging us to ask tough questions and reframe significant problems which, in turn, will result in novel solutions!

Why? Well, I like to think about where we are with sustainability today in relation to where we were in 1961 when President Kennedy said "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." There were a lot of doubters: the task seemed impossible, the money needing to be spent was huge and many asked 'what would it really give us?'. Sound familiar? But we did attain the goal---and more importantly, we went beyond! The inventions that were spawned in so many areas of science and engineering were then leveraged, not just to the moon, but to new products for our families and generated whole new businesses! The investment of the money and the commitment and passion to solve the myriad problems generated in this quest paid off in ways no one envisioned at that time.

We can look at sustainability as shooting for the stars! Sustainability is an umbrella concept covering so many things that it can be hard to get your arms around it. However, we can use sustainability as a way of driving our thinking about specific problems to frame the new questions and the challenges they present. Then we will see the passion of our scientists racing to find answers to these challenges and ultimately generate solutions that spawn new companies, new jobs! See you in the future!

Awesome Day 1: Outreach Event!!!

Today's outreach event was situated at the Boys and Girls Club in the southeast area of DC. As usual, the event was very well organized with wonderful volunteer turnout---Stacy and the entire team did a tremendous job and should feel really proud of the event!!

The kids (and their parents) were enthralled by a variety of age appropriate experiments ranging from the old standby of 'flubber' to 'new sense about cents' to 'density batons' to 'the nose knows' and so many others! The volunteers also had fun seeing (and trying) the new experiments being presented and sharing ideas on how to improvise variations of each one (you can never stop chemists from experimenting)!!

I had some great conversations with the kids....from one young man of about 10 years old who told me he liked science 'better than video games' to a young woman who said 'I really like science and math as you can use what you learn to solve problems"! I truly don't know who gets more out of all of this....the volunteers or the students! I also had the chance to meet lots of great members today....from long time DC area volunteers, Ann and Francis Leslie (Ann was also a councilor for 20 years)...to the students from Ball State who drove here in the university-donated E85 van (and had to locate the only E85 station in West Virginia).....to all of the volunteers from the Puerto Rico section...Ruth Woodall and team....and so many others!!

I included a few photos of the day to help capture some of the energy and fun we had working with these future scientists!!! Here's to everyone there today 'paying it forward' in our communities! You are all awesome! Thank You!!