Abigail Hebert

Jasmine Decrem ’28 and Giovanni Grassi ’28 met in Organic Chemistry I last fall. Their first collaboration was an organic chemistry remix of “Beauty and the Beat,” performed in Smith Union for Professor of Chemistry Michael Danahy.

“I wasn’t even a Chem Baddie when I met Gio,” Decrem said. “I literally became a chemistry major because of him. I thought, ‘Oh, I wanna keep taking classes with you.’”

This September, the pair gave their chemistry-originating friendship an Instagram account. The account, @chembaddies on Instagram, drew 700,000 views in the past month. Its top video, with 262,000 views and 13,900 likes, started as a lunchtime conversation in Moulton about exam grades with friend and fellow Chem Baddie Hyun Kim ’29.

The account’s name was an afterthought.

“Our Instagram was originally just Bowdoin chemistry,” Grassi said. “Then I think impulsively we were just like, ‘Let’s just add Baddies to the end because, like, why not?”

It stuck. Department staff now address their emails to “the Chem Baddies.”

The Chem Baddies’ humorous approach to chemistry originated last spring. In Decrem’s organic chemistry lab, Professor Richard Broene complained that students no longer pranked faculty the way they did when he was younger.

“It was something he was genuinely upset about,” Decrem said. “So then we just started really pranking him.”

Over the semester, Broene’s face appeared on life-sized cutouts held up by his lab section, then on posters throughout Druckenmiller Hall, which the students rebranded “Broenemiller.” Broene’s and Danahy’s cars received homemade bumper stickers reading “Baddie on board” and “NMR free.” For Teacher Appreciation Week, the students gave Broene a 3D-printed statue of himself in magenta, “which apparently is my ‘color’ for them,” Broene wrote in an email to the Orient.

Broene’s photo is now the account’s profile picture.

“I was a bit surprised by being the face of [Chem Baddies] but given the source, not overly so,” he wrote.

He hears about new posts from students and from his wife, who follows the account.

“I am enough of a dinosaur that I do not have an Instagram presence (or any other online account other than email),” Broene wrote. “If you told me at the beginning of the semester that a video of me would have [more than] 100,000 views, I would have laughed in your face.”

Their first breakout, a video filmed at the C-Store with Victoria Gonzalez ’29, reached about 100,000 views after larger chemistry accounts reposted it. An organic chemistry lab at Harvard University later used one of their videos in its slides.

“I called my mom. I was like, ‘Mom, [Chem Baddies] were featured at Harvard!’” Decrem said. “She’s like, ‘What’s Chem Baddies?’”

The response that mattered most came by direct message, when a prospective student wrote that the account convinced them to apply Early Decision.

“They said, ‘Watching you guys’ content, I can see there’s a place for me at Bowdoin,’” Decrem said. “Hearing those stories rather than just getting a certain number of views has been cool.”

Danahy said the account works because it challenges how outsiders see the field.

“People who aren’t in chemistry think of chemistry in a certain way, right? This is, like, stodgy stuff,” Danahy said. “It’s kind of cool to dispel that myth. Most of us in the department don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

Broene credited Decrem and Grassi’s friendship with creating a welcoming and fun culture in the department.

“This gives them a chance to see us as people as well as professors,” he wrote.

The Chem Baddies name has become a rallying cry in teaching labs.

“People have come up to me, and they’re like, ‘We were all struggling [in lab], and we all said to each other, No, we can do this. We’re Chem Baddies,’” Decrem said.

The account now runs alongside the Kamerling Society, a chemistry club Danahy asked the pair to help revive this fall. The group hosts weekly lunches with faculty and community outreach events. This Saturday, members will hand out candy and run a science demonstration at the Brunswick Halloween parade.

Meetings are Thursdays at 5:15 p.m. in Druckenmiller 24 and are open to all, regardless of major. The group already has an English major in its midst.

“You don’t even need to be in chemistry to be a Chem Baddie,” Grassi said.

Decrem and Grassi have a line they used to repeat in the Broene lab that defines what Chem Baddies has taught them:

“Maybe the chemistry was the friends we made along the way,” Decrem said.