SWRM 2024 General Information

Technical Lecture in "Chemical Reaction Kinetics, Dynamics, and Mechanisms" Symposium

Monday morning, October 20, 2024

tba, Waco Convention Center 

Award Lecture - "Capturing the molecular level mechanics driving bulk chemical behaviors from catalysis to the spectral dynamics of interfacial water with cryogenic ion spectroscopy"

5:45-7 pm  Monday  October 21, 2024

 McLennan Hall, Waco Convention Center 

The Gooch-Stephens Lectures are an annual event of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Baylor University, and honor two former Chairs of the Department – Dr. W.T. Gooch and Dr. W.R. Stephens. The Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Mark Johnson is one of two 2024 Gooch-Stephens Lecturers.  

Mark Johnson is the Arthur T. Kemp Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Yale University.  Johnson is known for the development and exploitation of experimental methods that capture and structurally characterize transient chemical species, such as reaction intermediates, using cryogenic ion chemistry in conjunction with multiple resonance laser spectroscopy. Johnson was born and in Oakland, California in 1954 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in chemistry and from Stanford University in 1983 with a Ph.D. chemistry with Dick Zare.  He was a postdoctoral fellow with Carl Lineberger at JILA/University of Colorado, Boulder, from 1983-1985 and joined the Yale faculty in 1985.  He has served as Chair of APS Division of Laser Science and the ACS Division of Physical Chemistry, was co-editor of Ann. Rev. Phys. Chem. from 2012 to 2022, and is presently co-editor of the Annual Review of Physical Chemistry.

Award Lecture - "Is a Blind Watchmaker the Same as a Blind Neural Net?"

5:45-7 pm  Tuesday  October 22, 2024

 McLennan Hall, Waco Convention Center 

The Gooch-Stephens Lectures are an annual event of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at Baylor University, and honor two former Chairs of the Department – Dr. W.T. Gooch and Dr. W.R. Stephens. The Department is pleased to announce that Dr. Andrew Ellington is one of two 2024 Gooch-Stephens Lecturers.  

Dr. Andrew Ellington received his B.S. in Biochemistry from Michigan State University in 1981, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard in 1988. His post-doctoral work was with Dr. Jack Szostak at Massachusetts General Hospital, where he developed methods for the in vitro selection of functional nucleic acids and coined the term 'aptamer.' He originally received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator, Cottrell, and Pew Scholar awards, and later was a Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow of the DoD and a Howard Hughes Professor.  Dr. Ellington's lab works centers on the development of nucleic acid circuitry for point-of-care diagnostics, on accelerating the evolution of proteins and cells through the introduction of novel chemistries, and on machine learning methods for engineering proteins and understanding evolutionary landscapes.

The Gooch-Stephens Lectures were established as a permanent annual event in recognition of the outstanding contributions of two longtime, highly respected chemistry professors and former department chairmen. Dr. W.T. Gooch became an instructor at Baylor University in 1908 after receiving two degrees from Baylor. His mentor was E.E. Reid, who later became an internationally known chemist at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Gooch received his doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied with such eminent chemists of that day as Nef and Stieglitz. Dr. Gooch was especially known for his organic chemistry courses, which were taken by all chemistry majors and premedical students. From 1909 to 1949, Dr. Gooch served as chairman of the chemistry department at Baylor University. He died April 21, 1973, at the age of 87. Dr. W.R Stephens, who joined the Baylor faculty in 1922, came to Baylor from Meridian College where he had been dean. Dr. Stephens received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Auburn University and completed his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, where he was associated with some of the best known chemists of that period. Dr. Stephens succeeded Dr. Gooch as chairman of the department in 1949. As chairman, Dr. Stephens enlarged the staff of the chemistry department and, in 1952, initiated and developed the doctor of philosophy program in chemistry. While chairman, Dr. Stephens devoted much of his energy and talents to the details of construction during the building of our former facilities in the Marrs McLean Science Building. He died Jan. 10, 1988, at the age of 95.

1970 Professor Irving M. Klotz

1971 Dr. Byron Riegel

1972  Professor Harry B. Gray

1974 Professor Melvin Calvin

1975 Professor Herbert C. Brown

1976 Professor Willard E. Libby

1977 Professor Glenn T. Seaborg

1978 Professor E. J. Corey

1980 Professor Wm. N. Lipscomb, Jr.

1980 Professor Henry Taube

1982 Dr. Rosalyn Yalow

1983 Professor llya Prigogine

1983 Professor Roald Hoffmann

1985 Professor Neil Bartlett

1986 Professor F. A. Cotton

1986 Professor Bruce Merrifield

1987 Professor Derek Harold Barton

1988 Professor Paul C.W. Chu

1989 Professor Johann Deisenhofer

1991 Professor Allen J. Bard

1991 Professor Yuan T. Lee

1992 Professor M. Frederick Hawthorne

1993 Professor Per–Olov Löwdin

1994 Professor Kyriacos C. Nicolaou

1995 Professor Tobin J. Marks

1996 Professor Richard N. Zare

1997 Professor R.E. Smalley

1998 Professor Robert G. Bergman

1999 Professor F. Sherwood Rowland

2000 Dr. Ahmed H. Zewail

2001 Dr. K. Barry Sharpless

2002 Dr. Robert H. Grubbs

2003 Prof. Alan MacDiarmid

2004 Dr. Charles P. Casey

2005 Dr. Barry M. Trost

2006 Dr. Stephen J. Lippard

2007 Sir Harold W. Kroto

2008 Sir J. Fraser Stoddart

2009 Professor Omar M. Yaghi

2010 Professor Nathan S. Lewis 

2013 Professor Donald R. Blake

2015 Professor Kendall N. Houk

2016 Professor Jon Clardy

2017 Professor Steven G. Boxer

2019 Professor Geraldine Richmond

2020 Professor Scott McLuckey