The University of Puerto Rico, Bayamon Campus founded the American Chemical Society UPR Bayamon Chapter (ACS-UPRB) in 2010. Recently, our chapter made the transition from being a local to a national student chapter, which gave us the opportunity to have an increasing number of national members. This also allowed us to expose our work in the 40<sup>th</sup> ACS Senior Technical Meeting of Puerto Rico, as well as in the 253<sup>rd</sup> American Chemical Society National Meeting & Expo hosted in San Francisco, California. Currently, we have a total of 33 national members and 86 local members. The ACS-UPRB is a nonprofit organization that has a main goal to educate our community in chemistry in diverse aspects of our professional lives as well as daily live. To accomplish our chapter’s goal, we formed different committees that include: Chemistry Education, Community Outreach, and Green chemistry.  In our commitment to bring scientific knowledge, our members have performed chemistry related demonstrations in a Pharmaceutical’s Science week, Oceanica’s Ecoexploratorium, Chemistry Festivals, and the Boys and Girls Club of Puerto Rico.  In order to help in the education in chemistry and its future as a professional, we provide to our members with tutoring services in General and Organic Chemistry. We also offered different seminars which include: Test Preparation, Chemical Engineers, Environmentalists, Forensic Chemists, and Doctors in chemistry. In an attempt to implement the importance of green chemistry, our chapter has offered seminars and demonstrative experiments in our campus and in schools around the island. An important aspect of our student chapter is our compromise to help our community. We had participated in coastal clean ups with the Scuba Dogs Society, doing volunteer work with breast cancer entities among others. Due to the catastrophic events that Puerto Rico has suffered by hurricane Maria, our chapter has been helped those people affected by bringing: food, water, supplies, breakfast, etc.  Due this situation, we also postponed the National Chemistry Week more ahead and organized chemistry demonstrations, nanotechnology experiments, seminars, and interactive games. In a future, we plan to impact different age groups through chemistry education in nearby hospitals, schools, and assisted living communities.

ACS-UPRB implementing community outreach through chemical education

255th National Meeting (2018)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.