2018 Chair-elect
Derik Frantz, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of chemistry at Cal Poly. He is a native of Pennsylvania, where he earned his B.S in chemistry from Juniata College in 2005. He then moved to Switzerland for an internship and remained there for graduate school, earning M.Sc. (2008) and Dr. sc. nat. (2012) degrees at the University of Zurich under the supervision of Jay Siegel. He was awarded a fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation to perform postdoctoral research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Timothy Swager’s laboratory from 2012 until 2014. He joined the faculty at Cal Poly in fall 2014.
2018 Treasurer
Jerry Macala, Ph.D. earned his B.S. in Chemistry from UCLA and worked in the organic peroxide industry for ten years, first as environmental compliance manager and later as plant manager where he coordinated the expansion and modernization of the facility for pharmaceutical production. He left this position to manage a remote research station at the geographic South Pole in Antarctica. During the winter he coordinated the first ever mid-winter medical evacuation to save the station’s ailing doctor. His crew was one of the last to occupy the historic geodesic dome which was built in the 1970’s and had become an icon of the US Polar Program. Following this assignment, and inspired by the science projects he managed in Antarctica, he returned to university to complete a Ph.D. at UCSB developing a new catalyst and process for chemical transformation of biomass feedstocks. He is currently the Chemistry Manager at iCRCO, where he directs research and development efforts to improve efficiency and performance of medical x-ray detectors. Prior to this he worked as Senior Scientist in the biomaterials research group at Allergan Medical, characterizing physical and morphological properties of silicone implants and drug eluting biopolymers. He has traveled a bit, lived in Australia for a year, lived at the South Pole for a year, been to Spain, Portugal, Morocco, London, Munich, Athens, Vienna, Kathmandu, Bangkok, much of New Zealand, most of Samoa, Eastern and Western China, and probably a few more he can’t remember. He has served on the board of Calpacs for several years and looks forward to contributing as Treasurer in the coming year.
2018 Secretary
James Pavlovich, Ph.D. James Pavlovich, Ph.D. is a Senior Analytical Scientist at Apeel Sciences in Goleta. Prior to that he spent more than 22 years as Manager of the UCSB Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Mass Spectrometry Facility. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Cal Poly, SLO in 1985. He worked at an environmental analytical laboratory in SLO from 1985-1987. He received his Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Oregon State University in Corvallis in 1993. He did postdoctoral research in the Environmental Science and Engineering Department at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. James has served as section chair, treasurer, and secretary.
2018 Councilor
Justin A. Russak, Ph.D. has been serving on the executive committee for the ACS Los Padres Chapter for the past 3 years with great pleasure. He served in the U.S. Army for 8 years as a combat medic before attending college at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, earning a Bachelor of Chemistry with honors and distinction in 2004. Following a desire to reach and impact undergraduate teaching he completed a PhD in Organic Chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 2010. Since then he has served as the laboratory coordinator for organic chemistry at UCSB and lecturer at California Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo. Currently he is affiliated with the Marine Sciences Institute at UCSB co-leading a project on tamarisk bio-control and as part-time lecturer of chemistry at Cal Poly.
2018 Alternative Councilor
Payam Minoofar, Ph.D. Having served CALPACS as a previous chair and member of the Executive Committee, I am volunteering to serve the section again as our section’s Alternative Councilor. The large and beautiful geography of our section presents our members with an unrivaled standard of living. It also presents the section officers with challenges with respect to organization of events. Having led the section’s transition to the digital realm over the past six years, I am seeking your support in being one of our section’s two voices in the ACS.
2018-20 Executive Committee
Crisjoe A. Joseph, Ph.D. is currently a lecturer of chemistry at UC: Santa Barbara where he has taught since 2013. Prior to UCSB, he was a postdoctoral fellow at UMass: Amherst under the tutelage of Michael Maroney conducting research on the solar conversion of hydrogen from water and protein aggregation. During his postdoc, he was involved in undergraduate research programs CURE-REU and SURE. At UMass: Amherst, he also lectured and won the Residential First-Year Experience Student Choice Award. Crisjoe earned his PhD in chemistry from UCSB under Peter Ford where he was looking at the photochemistry of nitroxyl ions and other inorganic compounds. He also was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award while he was TAing for UCSB. Crisjoe hopes to continue to train future chemist in the hopes that they can solve the problems the world in facing.
Heather Shafer, Ph.D. is the chemistry teacher at Bishop Diego High School in Santa Barbara. I have worked as a chemistry educator since earning my Ph. D. in analytical chemistry at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2000. Prior to 2013, I taught in the chemistry departments at Smith College and College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. One of my goals in life is to open up the minds of young adults to chemistry and get them interested in pursuing science in college. As a member of the Executive Board of CALPACS, I plan to serve as a liaison between the board and other local high school chemistry teachers. I also hope to spread my enthusiasm for chemistry with a larger share of the local community.
Joel Walker, Ph.D. After receiving my B.S. in chemistry from University of Nevada, Las Vegas, I worked as an analytical chemist for a couple years, after which I went to Ohio State University for graduate studies in Medicinal Chemistry. My work there focused on the synthesis and evaluation of retinoid chemotherapeutics. From there I journeyed to the University of Utah for post-doctoral studies in isoprenoid biosynthesis working with Dale Poulter. I started my industrial career shortly after at Albany Molecular Research as a medicinal chemist. After spending eight years there and gaining lots of experience, I came back west and now work at Promega Biosciences in San Luis Obispo. Lastly, I am an author/inventor on almost 30 publications/patent literature and have been a member of ACS for almost 20 years (I think, that seem like a long time!)
Kathy Phillips, Ph.D. is a project engineer with Geosyntec Consultants in Santa Barbara, California. Kathy received a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Chemical Engineering and a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctoral degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware. Her doctoral thesis involved applying computational chemistry to predict the behavior of chemicals in the environment, and she has received two environmental chemistry awards from the American Chemical Society. She was also selected to attend the American Chemical Society’s Summer School on Green Chemistry and Sustainability. Kathy has worked with Geosyntec for the last seven years where she has been involved in a range of projects in multiple U.S. states and internationally relating to the impacts of toxic chemicals on the environment and human health. Her experience includes risk characterization, project management, site investigation and monitoring, data analysis, radiological dose modeling, risk mitigation, remedy implementation, environmental forensics, litigation support, and regulatory reporting. Kathy has a strong history serving various organizations and the community as an active volunteer.
Kristi Lazar Cantrell, Ph.D. is currently an assistant professor of chemistry at Westmont College. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Westmont College, a master’s degree at Princeton University and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. She undertook two years of postdoctoral research at Genentech Inc., a biotech company, before returning to Westmont in the spring of 2010. Her research focus involves protein aggregation, including alpha-helical and beta-sheet fibril assembly. She has led National Chemistry Week outreach events with Westmont students on behalf of the Los Padres Section of the ACS during the past three years.
Robert Kargbo, Ph.D. is a medicinal chemist, an editor of Medicinal Chemistry Letters and a lecturer. He has collaborated on projects with industry and academic researchers in support of NIH National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke as part of the Medicinal Chemistry for Neuro-therapeutics Program (NINDA MCNP), is an editorial member for the American Chemical Society (ACS) Medicinal Chemistry Letters, and also a bi-monthly contributor to the Organic Process Research and Development (OPRD) Highlight publications. I am a recipient of the Pfizer Global Research and Development Research Fellowship, The McNair Scholar Award, and has over thirty patents and publications in high caliber peer-reviewed journals. He received his PhD in Synthetic Organic Chemistry at North Dakota University, and has lectured at the College of Medicine and Allied Health Sciences in Freetown, Sierra Leone. In his free time, he enjoys table tennis (ping pong), biking, reading and writing.
Woodward A. Maxwell, MA is currently a chemistry teacher at Ventura High School where he has been teaching since 1995. He was Science Department Chair from 1997 – 2017. He received a BA in Physics from Willamette University in 1982 and finished his teaching credential at CLU in 1988. He taught Life Science at Chaparral Middle School in Moorpark from 1988-1995. In 2003 he took a year sabbatical and was accepted into a course based master’s program in Chemistry at UCSB. In June 2004 he earned his MA in Chemistry and then was accepted into the RET (Research Experience for Teachers) program through the MRL. During the research phase he worked in Kevin Plaxco’s lab under Miguel De Los Rios characterizing the folding rates of a model protein. In the summer of 2005 he wrote organic curriculum for high school chemistry (that he still uses) based on the research from the previous summer. In 2006 he was accepted to another RET program administered by the NNIN working in Quyen Nguyen’s lab under Mark Dante characterizing gold on mica using and AFM for future reference when attaching SAM light absorbing molecules. In 2007 he accepted a lab position in Peter Ford’s Lab working under Jerry Macala making and characterizing hydrotalcites for use in transesterification reactions. In 2008 he started the SCOPE (Science as a Career Outreach Project Experiment) for Mike Bowers to coordinate graduate students speaking to high school classes about the prospect of becoming a scientist as a possible career path. This is the 10 th summer he has spent in the Bowers lab recruiting new graduate students and correlating the data from the previous school year. The SCOPE program now reaches 7 local high schools, 13 different teachers and hundreds of high school students each year.