10-04-2017, 07:21 PM
topic of organic chemistry seminar
Chemical Sensor Technologies for Chemical Analysis and Materials Characterization
Nitric oxide as a neurotransmitter:
Mesoporous materials: Synthesis, structure, and properties
Violating the Octet Rule: the Chemistry of Hypervalent Bonds
Hydrogen production from coal gasification
Extraterrestrial molecules
Structural characterisation of carbon nano-materials
Photoreduction of Metal Ions
Prevention of iron corrosion by amine-quinone polymers
Molecule-based magnetic materials and high-spin molecules
Synthesis of Carbon Nanotubes (CNTs) on porous Si
Use of the Hadamard transform in chemistry
Electrochemical fluorination
Advances in ion chromatography
New advances in supramolecular chemistry
Nanograin Magnetoresistive Manganite Coatings
Molecular Design of In-Situ Phosphatizing Coatings for Aerospace Primers
Hybrid organic/inorganic nanocomposites
Photoresist chemistry for X-ray lithography
New advances in crystal engineering
New biomaterial for scar healing
Emulsion Suspension Technology
Surfactant, Colloids and Interfaces
Water Based Polymers
Polymorphism in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Charge Transport Across the Metal-Molecule Interface
Boron Chemistry and Applications to Cancer Treatment
New Chemistry of Superelectrophiles
Boron-Pnictogen Multiple Bonds: Organometallic Alkenes and Alkynes
Seaweed extracts to improve battery performance
Water from hydrofracking
Quasicrystals
Lanthanide porphyrin complexes with sandwich structures
Thin film modeling of catalysts
Novel surface analytical techniques
Stereochemical nonrigidity in organometallic chemistry
The Seminar Abstract
A copy of all of the slides in the seminar printed 6 slides/page (read how to do this here) and a list of all of the references cited should be prepared and copies made for use by the audience.
Seminar Purpose
The purpose of the Literature Seminar is to provide you with an opportunity to perform a critical evaluation of a focused topic in Organic Chemistry, broadly defined. Through this experience, you will gain skills in effective visual presentation and oral communication of a technical subject. One of the most important goals of the Seminar experience is to develop your ability to master a technical subject area that is new to you in a relatively short period of time. Such an ability will be crucial for success in any career path you follow as a Ph.D. chemist. In order to achieve this educational goal, your seminar should focus an important subject and should have technical depth. Avoid "popular science" topics that do not provide the opportunity to explore the fundamental organic chemistry underlying the topic.
The Seminar Presentation
It is your option whether to use computer projection, overhead transparencies or chalkboard to present your talk. For some tutorials on using Powerpoint see this page and the Biochem Media lab tutorials. A ChemDraw template for seminar presentations is available.
As you probably know, the faculty discusses each graduate student's seminar and then sends a letter of evaluation to the presenter. All members of the audience also have the opportunity to provide constructive feed-back by filling out a questionnaire. Based on the talks given over the last several years, we offer some general suggestions to students who will be preparing talks for the coming academic year. Although most of the seminar presented in the department (by students and by outside speakers) are very good, some are less satisfactory. If one is thinking critically about presentation strategy, a great deal can be learned from these less satisfactory seminars about what not to do.
Employ a logical organization. The overall organization of a presentation is very important. Proper attention to this aspect of the talk can profoundly enhance the amount of knowledge your listeners carry away from the talk, and, directly or indirectly, implant a more favorable impression of you in your listeners' minds (an important consideration when you are interviewing for a job). It can be helpful to present an introductory outline of your subject a preliminary section of the talk in which you alert your listeners to the most important elements of your presentation. As you move through the body of the talk, you can refer back to that initial outline, at least verbally, and reinforce explicitly those points that you believe to be central. At the end, a summary in which the key points are reviewed helps to cement your message. In pursuing this organizational strategy, you must avoid becoming overly repetitive, but some repetition is necessary if new ideas and facts are to stick in your listeners' minds.
Be selective; do not try to present everything known in a given area. Two related considerations in a successful seminar presentation are the amount of material you cover and the pace at which you cover it. If you try to cover too broad a range of information, you risk confusing (and therefore losing) your audience, because of inadequate explanation of new concepts and/or too rapid a barrage of new facts. You must present enough material to keep the listeners' attention, but not so much that an informed listener cannot be thinking critically as you go. Striking the proper balances, therefore, requires that you eliminate superfluous details from your talk. For example, in a talk on the total syntheses of a class of natural products, one should focus on the most interesting, novel and strategically important reactions, minimizing consideration of more mundane intermediate steps.
Identify the most important structural and mechanistic issues and discuss some of them in depth. Be critical in your reading and presentation. Every graduate seminar should have a minimum mechanistic and structural content. Whatever topic you choose, remember that your listeners are organic chemists, and organic chemists think in terms of three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. In a presentation on a synthetic method, for example, a long list of examples is much less enlightening than a selected list discussed in the context of a mechanistic rationale. Even when mechanistic and structural issues are considered, a talk can suffer from a lack of critical thinking on the part of the presenting student.
Mechanisms are never 'proven', but rather are consistent with experimental observations. (The broader the range of observations explained by a mechanistic hypothesis, the stronger the hypothesis.) When you present a mechanism or other complex explanation, do not simply repeat what you have read; instead, tell your audience why the explanation is accepted and how other alternatives have been invalidated experimentally. In the best talks, the speaker goes even further, pointing out alternative acceptable hypotheses and/or critical experiments that have yet to be performed. (In this light, remember when choosing your topic that fields in which there is mechanistic controversy can lead to the most interesting seminars.)
While selecting a topic and preparing your presentation remember that you are giving an organic chemistry seminar. Whether your topic is rooted in traditional or non-traditional organic chemistry, your introduction should give the audience a context within which to appreciate the material that you are presenting. The boundaries between traditional scientific disciplines are eroding. As the frontiers of 'organic chemistry' expand (into materials science and chemical biology, for example), more and more students choose topics a little displaced from the center of classical organic chemistry. We encourage such choices. Still, you should focus your seminar on the organic chemical issues embedded in your particular topic and how these have impacted and enriched the scientific topic you have chosen. The pace and structure of such a talk may have to be different from those in a more familiar area of physical or synthetic organic chemistry, because new methods and concepts must be explained thoroughly. In any case, do not simply present a broad overview, or focus on non-chemical aspects of science or technology. For example, a seminar describing a new synthetic method is more interesting and memorable when the audience is apprised of the difficulties of accomplishing the transformations you are discussing.
Some important technical points:
Each slide or overhead should contain one relatively straightforward message. Cluttered slides (complex mechanistic schemes, large tables or complicated graphs) are often unintelligible to the audience. Be sure that the images fill your slides as fully as possible, so that the slides are clear to people sitting far from the screen.
By putting key literature references on the slides themselves, you help listeners in their subsequent pursuit of points that they find intriguing.
Avoid basing your entire presentation on a single recent literature review. This strategy usually leaves you parrotting someone else's biases. A central aim of the graduate seminar is to allow you to develop your own intellectual synthesis of one area of research. Furthermore, such a strategy is usually discerned by an informed listener and diminishes the impression your talk leaves with such a listener.
Even though you usually cannot refer to every important study in your chosen area, make sure that your bibliography is fully representative. Look for the most recent references in the area, so that your seminar will reflect the current state of the field.
Virtually everyone gets nervous before a presentation; some hide their anxiety better than others. The more at ease you appear to be, the more impressive your presentation will be, provided that you communicate a sense of vital interest in your topic. The most effective way to counter the effects of nervousness is to know your material as thoroughly as possible. Be sure to memorize the sequence of your slides, as this will imbue your presentation with confidence. You should practice your talk several times in front of other people. One or two run-throughs by yourself will make your practice sessions with others more productive. Memorize the text of your talk only if it is absolutely necessary, because a memorized speech is never as compelling as a presentation with a spontaneous edge. It can be helpful to memorize the first few minutes of your talk, and then let your natural interest in the subject take over. Concentrate on speaking clearly and loudly.
If you use a laser pointer, avoid excessive movement of the dot on the screen (e.g., point at something rather than rapidly circling it). This makes the pointer hard to see, and tires the audience as they try to follow the movement. If you use the pointer in your right hand, it is easier to point to the screen while looking at the audience if you stand to the right of the screen (audience's right); vice versa for left handed use.