Vera V Mainz

Vera Mainz is retired Director of the NMR Lab in the School of Chemical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics at Kansas Newman College (1976), a Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of California Berkeley (1981), spent 1-1/2 years working at Rohm and Haas in Springhouse, PA, and had a postdoctoral position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1983-1985) before becoming Director of the NMR Lab. She has been a member of the ACS since co-founding a student chapter of the ACS on her college campus in 1975. She joined the HIST Division in 1994, was elected to the position of Secretary-Treasurer in 1995, and has served as Secretary-Treasurer since that time. Over the course of these years she has expanded the responsibility of the Secretary-Treasurer to include being the HIST Division webmaster. Vera is committed to expanding the value and increasing the timeliness of the Division's website, including making all issues of the Bulletin for the History of Chemistry available to HIST members via the website. Her interest in the HIST Division was kindled when she presented her work on the chemical genealogy of the University of Illinois (UI) Chemistry Department at a HIST symposium on chemical genealogies in 1994. She has continued her work in this area, posting her information to a website at http://www.scs.uiuc.edu/~mainzv/Web_Genealogy/, and plans to update this project when her schedule allows. Vera's interest in the history of chemistry led her and her husband to co-curate two exhibits at the Univ. of Illinois' Rare Book Room: 1) From Alchemy to Chemistry: Five Hundred Years of Rare and Interesting Books, http://rbx-exhibit2000.scs.uiuc.edu; 2) Crystallography - Defining the Shape of Our Modern World, found online at URL http://xray-exhibit.scs.illinois.edu/ . Vera was a member of the ACS Fellows Class of 2012, which honored her contributions to the ACS (HIST and local section service) and the many students she has helped while working in the NMR Lab.