David Clemmer:  

I've been asked to tell my story. I find it difficult to report on 25 years...but here goes. After I graduated from AHS in 1983 I didn't know enough so I attended ASC. I started as a music major but was converted by Kay Watkins into a Chemistry major. While at ASC I played guitar with the Yard Dogs, Lyx and Cottonwood Grove, and took lessons from Don Richmond. After I graduated from ASC in 1987 I didn't know enough so I moved to Utah and worked on a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry. I played in a jazz/folk music band and learned to ski and run. I had a cancer surgery on Sept 26, 1991 and missed running the St. George marathon. I finished my last round of radiation therapy in the spring of 1992 and defended my thesis. After I finished my thesis in 1992 I didn't know enough so I took a position as a postdoctoral associate in Japan. There I played music in a Japanese band and built an instrument to study oxidative addition of C-H bonds across netral transition metals. It turns out that neutral metals are terrible at activating bonds (because of this they make bad catalysts. After I finished my first postdoc in Japan in 1993 I moved to Chicago to attend Northwestern again as a postdoc. Postdoctoral positions are more like fellowships than jobs...At Northwestern I worked on a new form of atomic carbon clusters called fullerenes. On new years eve a small group of graduate students celebrated with me as we discoved a new type of fullerene -one with a metal atom as a part of the cage (so metals will add to fullerenes). My advisor and I published this work in the journal Nature and the result was good enough for me to fi...Expand for more