2018-2019 President’s Report

Hello to all members and friends of CCDG. We have just wrapped up our 2018-2019 season, and throughout the year I have had the privilege of working with a talented and hard-working board to accomplish some amazing things.

This year, we changed our membership term and our sponsorship term to reflect the calendar year. This was done to help our members, as well as our board, to help keep track of renewals. We are also in the process of transitioning to a new program for membership renewal that will streamline the process of renewing membership

In the fall, we launched a brand-new website. We found this new website to be more user friendly, and enables us to keep our website updated in a timelier fashion. Our new website also allows us to share more pictures from our dinner lectures and our schools.

This year we were very excited to bring back our GC school, which was held at Roosevelt University in Schaumburg. It was a huge success with 13 students, and the instructor, Dr. Lee Polite went above and beyond for our students ensuring they left the class well informed.

Our GC school was such a success at Roosevelt University that we decided to move our LC school to the same location. Dr. Merlin Bicking once again led an outstanding course in which the students learned a great deal about liquid chromatography.

At our Young Scientist Dinner lecture, we awarded graduate student Sarah Lum with the Young Scientist Award. Her presentation on a novel way to quickly and efficiently analyze rape kits was both captivating and informative. We look forward to seeing what else Sarah will accomplish in her career.

We attended two conferences this year, the Midwest Association of Toxicology and Therapeutic Drug Monitoring in Cleveland, and the ACS Great Lakes Regional Meeting in Lisle. Attending conferences helps us to grow our organization and accomplish our motto of Sharing in Knowledge.

Lastly, we hosted four dinner lectures this year, ranging in topics from tips and tricks in gas chromatography to the challenges of teaching chromatography in a third world country. A huge thank you to all of our speakers this year, Eric Pavlich of Agilent, Gosia Medrecki, Kayla Watanabe, Sarah Lum, Dr. John Stuff of Gerstel, and Dr. Merlin Bicking of ACCTA.

Thank you all for supporting CCDG through membership, dinner lectures, or our schools, and I am looking forward to another wonderful year!

Regards,

Amy Alexander
CCDG President