Alumni from Cornell’s chemistry department will return to campus April 11 for an all-day event to share stories of their careers in chemistry.

“The Places You Will Go: How Chemistry Impacted My Life – Cornell and Beyond,” will feature five alums with careers from medicine to forensic science to art preservation. It will be held in 120 Physical Sciences Building and is free and open to the public.

“Cornellians graduate and change the world,” said Dave Collum, the Betty R. Miller Professor of Chemistry and chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. “The department’s sesquicentennial symposium celebrates five former chemistry students who did so in profound and profoundly interesting ways.”

The event, which begins with opening remarks at 9 a.m., is this year’s George Fisher Baker Lecture, an endowed lectureship that began in 1926 and has featured multiple Nobel Prize winners throughout the years.

Speakers will continue through the day and include:

• Frank Douglas, Ph.D. ’73, M.D. ’77, president emeritus of the Austen BioInnovation Institute Akron (ABIA) and CEO of VAX Genetics Vaccine Co. Prior to joining ABIA, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and the departments of chemistry and biological engineering. He also was founder and first executive director of the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation and executive vice president for Aventis AG.
• Peter Kim ’79, the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University. Kim is a member of Stanford ChEM-H, an interdisciplinary institute, and former president of Merck Research Laboratories. Kim is a structural biologist who discovered how proteins cause viral membranes to fuse with cells. He also has designed novel compounds that stop membrane fusion by the AIDS virus and pioneered efforts to develop an HIV vaccine based on similar principles.
• Robert Langer ’70, Institute Professor at MIT, the highest honor awarded to an MIT faculty member, and Cornell’s 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year. Langer ranks as one of the most published and cited engineers of all time, with 1,080 issued and pending patents worldwide. His patents have been licensed or sublicensed to more than 250 companies. He served as chairman of the FDA’s Science Board 1999-2002.
• Karen Trentelman, Ph.D. ’89, senior scientist and leader of the technical studies research group at the Getty Conservation Institute. Her current research includes the materials and firing conditions used in ancient Athenian pottery; revealing hidden features in paintings and manuscripts using noninvasive spectroscopic and imaging technologies; and fostering the integration of imaging and analytical data.
• Kirk Yeager, Ph.D. ’93, who has served as a chemist, scientist and forensic examiner with the FBI since 2000. He initially worked as a physical scientist/forensic examiner for the FBI Laboratory’s Explosive Unit and later was promoted to senior scientist in that unit. Currently, he serves as chief explosives scientist in the FBI Laboratory’s Terrorist Explosive Device Analytical Center. Throughout his career with the FBI, he has conducted research into the chemistry and physical effects of explosives and explosive devices.

The day will end with a 3 p.m. roundtable featuring all five speakers.

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.