National ACS Award Winners 2022 LO Collection

This collection of learning objects was created to celebrate the National ACS Award Winners 2022 who are members of the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. The list of award winners is shown below. 

Shirley Lin / United States Naval Academy Sat, 03/12/2022 - 07:01

Metallocene cations and anions

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Tue, 09/23/2025 - 11:39
Description

This is a really interesting paper in J. Am. Chem. Soc. (2025, 147, 34641-34646) involving a complex salt in which both the cation and anion are metallocenes. While a majority of the paper is focused on the characterization of two new compounds, it presents some excellent opportunities to practice counting electrons, one of which was a challenge to this author.

SLiThEr #65: Publishing at a PUI

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Mon, 07/28/2025 - 07:52
Description

Kyle Grice (DePaul) and Jacob Lutter (University of Southern Indiana) will present on how they have been successful in designing and publishing research at their respective PUI.

SLiThEr #64: Developing ACS Guidelines for Undergraduate Chemistry Programs

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Mon, 07/28/2025 - 07:41
Description

A discussion about the 2023 ACS Guidelines for Undergraduate Chemistry Programs with Michelle Brooks (Assistant Director of the Office of Higher Education at ACS), Cora MacBeth (Emory University) and Barb Reisner (James Madison University). Additional discussion is available to registered faculty users.

SLiThEr #63: Catching up with Reilly and Sydney

Submitted by Chip Nataro / Lafayette College on Mon, 07/28/2025 - 07:25
Description

This goes back to SLiThEr #14 when we interviewed two senior undergraduates in the midst of the COVID pandemic. At the time of this SLiThEr, both are in graduate school and getting close to their PhD.

Reilly Gwinn (Virginia Tech) and Sydney Towell (UNC - Chapel Hill) update us on their career paths.

COMFORT, A web resource for fragment molecular orbitals of simple fragments

Submitted by samuelson / Indian Institute of Science on Tue, 06/17/2025 - 02:56
Description

The website entitled COMFORT (https://ipc.iisc.ac.in/~ags/ip312/comfort.html) is a easy way to visualise fragment molecular orbitals of many different organic ligands and also metal fragments. One can match the frontier orbitals of the fragments to see if they can form stable molecules. It helps one to see how fragments of an octahedral organometallic complex can be stripped of its ligands one by one to generate fragments that can match organic ligands with multiple "pi" bonds.

Determining Oxidation State: The Arrow Pushing Method

Submitted by Jared Pienkos / University of Tennessee at Chattanooga on Mon, 04/14/2025 - 10:05
Description
    1. Determining the oxidation state of atoms is foundational in chemistry. For inorganic chemistry, students must be able to accurately calculate oxidation numbers of transition metals, which can differ depending on the ligands attached.

Interpreting Tanabe-Sunago diagrams

Submitted by Adam Johnson / Harvey Mudd College on Mon, 03/24/2025 - 17:27
Description

I was lecturing along today, teaching the basics of the theory and how to interpret Tanabe-Sunago diagrams, and I got to my slides where I show them how to calculate ∆o from Co(en)3, and it just fell apart. I had done V(III) as a first example, and then I wanted the students to practice the calculations, but my slides were not up to the task. I thought to myself, in the moment, this would be a good opportunity to do an in-class activity, I should write it. So, in the spirit of making next year easier, I did. I have not used this in class, but I wish I had had it this morning.