The Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah established the Distinguished Chemistry Alumni Awards in 2011 to recognize and honor our most prominent and successful alumni. We celebrated four of our outstanding alumni on September 30, 2024  in the Department of Chemistry. The awardees held seminars and visited faculty and students in the department. On September 30, during the awards dinner, they received well-deserved awards for their accomplishments and involvement with the department, faculty, and students.

Gretchen Domek

Dr. Gretchen Domek is an Associate Professor in the Section of General Academic Pediatrics and the William K. Frankenburg Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She is also a general pediatrician, the director of the International Adoption Clinic, and a provider in the Kids In Care Settings (KICS) Clinic at Children’s Hospital Colorado. Her current research focuses on early childhood development in resource limited settings. She has designed and implemented a community health program promoting early childhood health and development in southwest Guatemala and rural China. She has also developed a primary care-based intervention, called PUPPETalk, using finger puppets to promote positive, language-rich parent-infant interactions. Dr. Domek earned her B.S. in Biological Chemistry from the University of Utah in 2003, MPhil in Medical Anthropology from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, and M.D. from Harvard Medical School. She completed a pediatric residency and a global heath fellowship at the University of Colorado.

De. Domek’s presentation was titled “Rhodes” from Utah to Medical School and Beyond. She talked about her experiences in the Honors College and Chemistry Department at Utah and how those experiences prepared her for graduate studies at Oxford and Harvard Medical School and now a career in academic medicine, global health, and pediatrics.

 

Alan Eastman

Alan Eastman received both an MS cum laude (1971) and a PhD in Chemistry (1975) from the University of Utah.  His research advisor was Dr. Robert W. Parry. Alan’s thesis work on coordinatively-unsaturated boron cations was an excellent introduction to heterogeneous catalysis, the field in which Alan worked for Phillips Petroleum Company’s research lab in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, for many years.  He also spent a few years with Phillips doing chemical and plastics marketing research, followed by a few years back in the lab doing online process monitoring and advanced infrared and laser Raman spectrophotometry with chemometric statistical data analysis.

While in Oklahoma, working with Phillips, Alan was active in the community and led, at various times, the community theater and choral groups, and spent a term as president of the school board.  He oversaw the approval of the most significant bond issue in the town’s history, which led to a complete renovation and expansion of the high school. Alan was named the city’s Outstanding Citizen for 2003.

Following early retirement from Phillips, Alan worked as a consultant in online process analysis, then spent several years running the US end of a company called EcoAdvanced that sold high-end fully-synthetic motor oil in Japan.  After that, Alan co-founded GreenFire Energy, to produce biofuels from algae.  They quickly discovered that the opportunities in algae were mostly in synthesizing specialty chemicals using genetically-modified materials – and that none of them was a biologist!  However, a process that Alan devised to separate oil from algae got the three of them interested in using supercritical CO2 as a heat carrier in geothermal energy production, so GreenFire became a geothermal company.  An experienced startup acquired the company and is now pursuing geothermal projects in several countries.  Alan holds 39 US patents with numerous foreign equivalents and has submitted five more applications currently pending.

In his spare time, Alan works as the Utah chair of DarkSKy International, plays keyboards in two swing bands, teaches science classes at the Osher Institute, and travels with his wife Vickie and their nine children and grandchildren.

Dr. Eastman’s presentation was titled, “I wear the chains I forged at the lab bench. ”  He discussed how his career was strongly affected by what he learned in the Chemistry Department.

 

Paul Weider

Paul graduated in 1978 from the University of Utah with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry.  During his last year at Utah, Paul participated in Undergraduate Research in the labs of Professor Gary Keck.  The experience changed the course of his education – he discovered he loved lab work.  Paul received a Master’s degree in Organic Chemistry from Ohio State University in 1980 and a PhD in Organometallic Chemistry from Colorado State University in 1985.  Immediately after earning his PhD, Paul started work with Shell Development Co. in the Chemical Research and Development group.  Soon after joining Shell, Paul became interested in new techniques for studying industrial catalysts “in situ” – under actual reaction conditions.  Research in Paul’s labs led to the fundamental patents that underpinned the Shell PDO process.  For his work, he was honored with an RD 100 award in 1998, and in 2000, Paul was the co-recipient of the American Chemical Society’s Award for Team Innovation.

In 2005, Paul turned his attention to renewable chemicals and fuels. In 2009, Paul conceived the basis for what would become Shell Fiber Conversion Technology.  Recently, Shell and Green Plains held a grand opening ceremony in York, Nebraska, for a third-generation Biorefinery based on this process.

Paul retired from Shell in 2021 as one of the company’s six “Principal Science Experts.”  He is named as co-inventor on 67 US patents and has given over 100 professional talks at meetings of the ACS and other organizations. Paul has participated in plant start-up and improvement projects worldwide and now consults on various renewable chemicals and fuel processes.

Dr. Weider’s presentration was titled “Operando Chemistry as a Tool for Chemical Process Innovation.”Operando chemistry is a reaction analysis method that employs in situ spectroscopy under actual reaction conditions combined with reaction selectivity and kinetics to provide detailed insight into reaction mechanisms.  This has been used to create and accelerate commercial deployment of chemical processes.

 

Distinguished Chemistry Alumni Gretchen Domek, Alan Eastman and Paul Weider with Professors Peter Armentrout, Rick Ernst, Joel Harris, and Peter Stang, on September 30, 2024 at the Distinguished Chemistry Alumni Awards event.