Nobel Prize-Winning Chemist to Host Buckyball Workshop
Event Designed to Introduce Middle-Schoolers to Excitement of STEM
Nobel Prize-winning Florida State University chemistry Professor Harry Kroto is hosting local middle school students for a “Buckyball Workshop” on Tuesday as part of his ongoing initiative to help young people learn and get excited about science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This workshop, which covers a wide range of subjects from an introduction to algebra to the composition of stars in the sky, also actively involves the students in a hands-on molecular model building exercise that introduces them to important aspects of structure and geometry.
By presenting these workshops all over the world, Kroto, the Francis Eppes Professor of Chemistry at Florida State, has inspired thousands of young people of all ages from Japan to Australia and Sweden to California to understand and appreciate the important role and humanitarian contributions that STEM disciplines have played and continue to play in the modern world. The Buckyball Workshop features the all-carbon C60 Fullerene molecule, which has a soccer ball shape. The discovery of the molecule, which Kroto named after the architect, designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller, earned him and two colleagues at Rice University the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996.
The workshop will take place:
TUESDAY, MARCH 20
9:30 A.M.
DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY AND BIOCHEMISTRY
CHEMICAL SCIENCES LABORATORY
95 CHIEFTAN WAY
FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
# # #
CONTACT: Tom Butler, University Communications
(850) 644-8634; tbutler@admin.fsu.edu
