Allison Rafuse (now at Arqule) married David Scott this past summer of 2004. Congratulations and much happiness to them!

Pamela Hill (now at Astra-Zeneca) married Tom Hill in 2004. Congratulations on this UMass-Amherst union, and much happiness to them!

Yanbing Liu accepted a position at Pharmeco in Massachusetts in summer 2004. She has already had a number of successful syntheses, she reports. She also says her family is fine. Welcome back, Yanbing!

Burak Esat is a supervisor of the R&D department at Gemsan A.S. in Istanbul. His lovely wife and two handsome sons are doing well, and he is getting more used to administrative duties (PML says good luck with that administrative thing).

Ahmet Inceli says that all is well at the close of 2004 with him, his wife, and his lovely children. See some pictures of him with his wonderful family.

Rusty Denton reports that all is well as he continues to practice law at King & Spalding, LLC in Atlanta, while also dabbling heavily in his chemistry interests. He has been invited to be an adjunct professor at University of Georgia School of Law.

PML was an invited speaker at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee during February 2004. His talk was entitled " Luminescence in Conjugated Molecules, Segmented copolymers, and Conjugated polymers: Excited States in the Polyarylenevinylenes".

Graduate student Hemali Rathnayake received a departmental posterfest "Best Poster" award in spring 2004, which gave her travel grant. She used some of the funds to attend the Sixth International Symposium on Functional pi-Electron Systems at Cornell University in June 2004, where she and PML presented work by her, Cesar Sierra, Jitapa Sumranjit, and Nibedita Ray.

Graduate students Martha Baskett, Cesar Sierra, Zeynep Delen, and Patrick Taylor made presentations at the American Chemical Society Meeting in Philadelphia in August 2004. As a result, the group's work was well-represented, with good turnouts at their sessions (thanks to them for good press on behalf of us all). They also got to meet group alumni Masaki Minato, David Modarelli, and Andrew Ichimura, who were at the meeting at the same time.

PML was an invited speaker at the Molecular Mimicry of Photosynthesis Symposium of the American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia in August 2004. While there, he attended an 80th birthday party celebration of friends and former group members of Jerome A. Berson (his mentor at Yale University in the early 1980's).

PML received a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science travel fellowship, which enabled him to travel in Japan through most of October 2004, following arrangments made by Prof. Hiroyuki Nishide of Waseda University. He met people at the ICMM2005 meeting at Tsukuba, gave lectures at several universities (Keio University, Waseda University, Tokyo University, Mie University, Kyushu University, Osaka University, Osaka City University). He also had the great pleasure of renewing acquaintances with many friends from Japanese chemical academia, and meeting many of the rising stars there, as well. He also gave an invited talk at Osaka City University entitled " What are the points in oral presentations at international conferences? Recipes for Graduate Students", intended as a primer for young faculty and older graduate students and postdocs. See the pics.

Graduate student Cesar Sierra successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation work in spring 2005. His disseration was entitled Energy Transfer in Multichromophoric, Segmented PPV Copolymers and Oligomers. He has returned home to Columbia, and took a faculty position at the Universidad de Santander. Best of luck with your new career, Cesar!

Lora M. Field has accepted a position at Xerox Corporation in Toronto, following a successful postdoctoral stint at U-Toronto. Check out the Field's new house!

Paul Singer successfully passed his M.S. final examination in May 2005. Congratulations, Paul, and best of luck.