Eman Abdelhadi is a scholar, organizer and writer based in Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. Her research has been cited by NPR, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, and other outlets. She co-wrote the revolutionary sci-fi novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (Common Notions Press 2022), and she writes a regular column on Palestine and politics for In These Times Magazine.

She is a long-time organizer in the movement for Palestinian liberation and is currently active through Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine at UChicago. She helped found the group Sociologists for Palestine, a group organizing within the American Sociological Association (ASA) to advance a resolution supporting a just peace in Israel-Palestine and has also been involved with the Uncommitted National Movement.

She will be giving a talk on campus accesible via Zoom.

Join Global Education Oregon for an information session on the summer 2025 Studio Art in Athens program. The program is a great opportunity explore Athens through a series of lectures, fieldwork, daily excursions to archaeological sites and museums, and contemporary galleries while creating interdisciplinary art.

You can learn more about the Studio Art in Athens program here: https://geo.uoregon.edu/programs/europe-greece/studio-art-athens

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Organic/Inorganic/Materials Seminar Series

Professor Professor Renana Gershoni Poranne, Technion Hosted by Mike Haley

Data are a Girl’s Best Friend: From High-Throughput Computation to Generative Deep Learning

Chemical databases are an essential tool for data-driven investigation of structure-property relationships and design of novel functional compounds, and they are the crucial foundation for machine- and deep-learning techniques, which efficiently map the chemical space and allow discovery of new molecular motifs of molecules and materials for various uses. However, there is a lack of suitable databases of polycyclic aromatic systems (PASs).

To enable the application of such techniques to the design of novel functional PASs, we established the COMPAS Project — a COMputational database of Polycyclic Aromatic Systems. This new database already contains over 500k molecules in three datasets: cata-condensed polybenzenoid hydrocarbons (COMPAS-1),1 cata-condensed hetero-PASs (COMPAS-2),2 and peri-condensed polybenzenoid hydrocarbons (COMPAS-3).3

With this new data in hand, we demonstrate the first examples of interpretable learning models in the chemical space of PASs. To this end, we developed two types of molecular representation to enable efficient and effective machine- and deep-learning models to train on the new data: a) a text-based representation4 and b) a graph-based representation.5 Our dedicated representations not only achieve higher predictive ability with fewer data, but are also amenable to interpretation – thus allowing the extraction of chemical insight from the model.

Using the COMPAS database and our dedicated representations, we implemented the first guided diffused-based model for inverse design of PASs: GaUDI.6 Our model generates new PASs with defined target properties. In addition to its flexible target function and high validity scores, GaUDI also accomplishes design of molecules with properties beyond the distribution of the training data.

References

(1)  Wahab, A.; Pfuderer, L.; Paenurk, E.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. The COMPAS Project: A Computational Database of Polycyclic Aromatic Systems. Phase 1: Cata-Condensed Polybenzenoid Hydrocarbons. J. Chem. Inf. Model. 2022, 62 (16), 3704.

(2)  Mayo Yanes, E.; Chakraborty, S.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. COMPAS-2: A Dataset of Cata-Condensed Hetero-Polycyclic Aromatic Systems. Sci. Data 2024, 11 (1), 97.

(3)  Wahab, A.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. COMPAS-3: A Data Set of Peri-Condensed Polybenzenoid Hydrocarbons. ChemRxiv February 26, 2024.

(4)  Fite, S.; Wahab, A.; Paenurk, E.; Gross, Z.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. Text-Based Representations with Interpretable Machine Learning Reveal Structure-Property Relationships of Polybenzenoid Hydrocarbons. J. Phys. Org. Chem. 2022, e4458.

(5)  Weiss, T.; Wahab, A.; Bronstein, A. M.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. Interpretable Deep-Learning Unveils Structure–Property Relationships in Polybenzenoid Hydrocarbons. J. Org. Chem. 2023, 88 (14), 9645–9656. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.joc.2c02381.

(6)  Weiss, T.; Mayo Yanes, E.; Chakraborty, S.; Cosmo, L.; Bronstein, A. M.; Gershoni-Poranne, R. Guided Diffusion for Inverse Molecular Design. Nat. Comput. Sci. 2023, 3 (10), 873–882. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00532-0.

by Selina Fillinger

Directed by Tricia Rodley One four-letter word is about to rock 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant and beleaguered women he relies upon most risk life, liberty, and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-in-chief out of trouble.

Selina Fillinger’s brilliant, all-female farce took Broadway by storm in a star-studded production that earned three 2022 Tony nominations.

Synopsis courtesy of Concord Theatricals

by Selina Fillinger

Directed by Tricia Rodley One four-letter word is about to rock 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. When the President unwittingly spins a PR nightmare into a global crisis, the seven brilliant and beleaguered women he relies upon most risk life, liberty, and the pursuit of sanity to keep the commander-in-chief out of trouble.

Selina Fillinger’s brilliant, all-female farce took Broadway by storm in a star-studded production that earned three 2022 Tony nominations.

Synopsis courtesy of Concord Theatricals

Join LiveMove for a coffee shop chat with Senior Instructor Nick Kohler (Geography) and Professor Gordon Sayre (English/Folklore). Drop in and chat about car cultures, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), human-environment interactions, automobility, car-centrism, the future of transportation, ecocriticism, and more.

There will be free pastries and coffee while supplies lasts! Open to all.

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Physical Chemistry Seminar Series

Professor James Prell, University of Oregon

Measuring Energy Landscapes for Biomolecules  with Native Mass Spectrometry

Advances in instrumentation for structural biology and bioanalytical chemistry have enabled the study of ever larger and more dynamic biomolecules and biomolecular complexes. Native ion mobility-mass spectrometry offers advantages for interrogating small, heterogeneous, and dynamic samples while preserving much high-order structure even as analytes are transferred from buffered aqueous solution into the gas phase. Deliberate, precisely controlled heating of the resulting ions inside the mass spectrometer can result in collision-induced dissociation and/or unfolding (CID/U) of non-covalent complexes, revealing structural information that can be exceptionally difficult to access with conventional techniques. However, to date, a quantitative understanding of CID and CIU as a function of acceleration potentials, gas pressure and identity, and other factors has been lacking.

Our recently introduced software suite (IonSPA) can quantitatively predict ion heating, cooling, and motion in such experiments and be used to determine dissociation and unfolding barriers, which are crucial information for interpreting experimental data in terms of structures and chemical properties of the solution-phase biomolecules. We further show that this model can be used to reconcile data acquired using very different instrumentation from a variety of vendors, a key step in tethering these readily available experiments to a universal physical chemistry framework.

Students taking WR 121z, 122z, or 123 are invited to drop by the Tykeson 3rd floor Writing Lab (glass room, 351) for candy and quick writing support. Our GE Writing Support Specialists (tutors) are available to help you with any part of a WR assignment, from coming up with ideas to reading to revising to polishing up a final draft. Join us!

Mondays 3-4 and Thursdays 2-3, beginning week 4, for the rest of Winter quarter 2025.

Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Organic/Inorganic/Materials Seminar Series

Professor Holger Bettinger, University of Tübingen Hosted by Mike Haley

A Journey from Long Acenes to Cyclacenes

Acenes are a fundamentally and technologically important class of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Their small HOMO-LUMO gap is a blessing for materials properties but a curse for synthesis, characterization, and handling. My research group has achieved acenes of unprecedented lengths under the stabilizing conditions of matrix isolation and on-surface synthesis that allowed gaining an understanding of acene properties up to pentadecacene (15acene).[1] The key to success is the application of a protection group strategy that enables the release of acenes under these extreme conditions. The cyclic versions of acenes, cyclacenes, are unknown despite significant synthetic efforts since Edgar Heilbronner’s 1954 proposal. I will address expected properties of these zig-zag nanohoops and discuss strategies of their experimental realization using the low-temperature high-vacuum techniques in our laboratory.[2]

1. a) C. Tönshoff, H. F. Bettinger, Photogeneration of Octacene and Nonacene, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed. 2010, 49, 4125, 10.1002/anie.200906355; b) B. Shen, J. Tatchen, E. Sanchez-Garcia, H. F. Bettinger, Evolution of the Optical Gap in the Acene Series: Undecacene, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2018, 57, 10506, 10.1002/anie.201802197; c) Z. Ruan, J. Schramm, J. B. Bauer, T. Naumann, H. F. Bettinger, R. Tonner-Zech, J. M. Gottfried, Synthesis of Tridecacene by Multistep Single-Molecule Manipulation, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2024, 146, 3700, 10.1021/jacs.3c09392; d) Z. Ruan, J. Schramm, J. B. Bauer, T. Naumann, L. V. Müller, F. Sättele, H. F. Bettinger, R. Tonner-Zech, J. M. Gottfried, On-surface Synthesis and Characterization of Pentadecacene and its Gold Complexes, submitted for publication 2024. 2.  a) D. Gupta, A. Omont, H. F. Bettinger, Energetics of Formation of Cyclacenes from 2,3-Didehydroacenes and Implications for Astrochemistry, Chem. Eur. J. 2021, 27, 4605, https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.202003045; b) J. B. Bauer, F. Diab, C. Maichle-Moessmer, H. Schubert, H. F. Bettinger, Synthesis of the [11]cyclacene framework by repetitive Diels-Alder cycloadditions, Molecules 2021, 26, 3047, 10.3390/molecules26103047; c) A. Somani, D. Gupta, H. F. Bettinger, Computational Studies of Dimerization of [n]-Cyclacenes, J. Phys. Chem. A 2024, 128, 6847, 10.1021/acs.jpca.4c02833.

Please join us for the February pub lecture hosted by the Department of History, the Lane County Historical Society, and the Oregon Humanities Center! Professor Vera Keller will discuss “The History of Pre-History: How Archaeology Began."  

Free and open to everyone!

The UO Department of History and the Lane County Historical Society present a series of talks with scholars about history, from the local to the global. Join us for stories, food, and conversation in a casual setting!