INFORMATION CONCERNING THE YEAR 2008

PITTSBURGH CONFERENCE MEMORIAL NATIONAL COLLEGE GRANTS

The primary goal of the Pittsburgh Conference is to promote science education at all levels. The
PCMNCG program is one aspect of the efforts of the volunteer Committee members of the Pittsburgh Conference and its sponsoring societies to support science education.

This year, the maximum funding available for each grant is $10,000.

Last year we received approximately 60 proposals from small colleges and universities who met our requirements. Each proposal was reviewed by members of our evaluation committee, made up of members of the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh and the Spectroscopy Society of Pittsburgh (sponsoring societies of the Pittsburgh Conference).

Strong proposals had the following characteristics (in no particular order):

• Good development and organization
• PCMNCG funds were leveraged by matching contributions from the university or another source
• Specific examples of how the requested equipment would be integrated into the science programs
• Requested equipment and materials would impact a large number of students
• Brief descriptions of specific experiments that demonstrated broad use of the equipment

Reviewers tended not to rate highly those proposals that were too general, where PCMNCG money was a very small part of a large project, requests for classroom infrastructure and A/V equipment, or where only a small fraction of the students enrolled in science were affected.

Examples of equipment and instruments funded in previous years are listed below. In some cases, more than one school requested a particular type of instrument.

AA Spectrometer
UV/VIS Detector for HPLC plus columns
Gas Chromatograph, Software and Supplies
Human Muscular Torsos
UV/VIS Spectrophotometer
Automated Pipettes
HPLC
NMR Workstations and Software
1H/13C Dual-Channel NMR Probe
FTIR Software Upgrade and Spectral Libraries
Camera and Software for a Fluorescence Microscope