UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH
A
strong undergraduate research component is the hallmark of outstanding
undergraduate chemistry departments.
The Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the College of Charleston places heavy emphasis on undergraduate research and encourages our students to participate in undergraduate research either here with our faculty or with faculty elsewhere (such as the Medical University of South Carolina). Academic credit can be awarded for undergraduate research. Several faculty members have extramural funding and can give financial support to students for summer research. All students performing undergraduate research for credit are required to present results at the annual College of Charleston Poster Session, the South Carolina Academy of Science, or at regional meetings of the various disciplines. The Department is listed in the latest edition of the Directory in Chemistry at Primarily Undergraduate Institutions (6th edition, 1995) and belongs to the Council on Undergraduate Research.
In the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, research is viewed as an important component of teaching. In fact, research is viewed by many chemists as the ideal method of teaching. Students work shoulder-to-shoulder with faculty to solve problems in creative and cooperative ways. While it is often true that the faculty member proposes the problem, it is a vital part of the teaching process that the student becomes an active partner in analysis and solution of the problem.
The success of research in an undergraduate department depends upon four ingredients. First, we must have a creative faculty with the interest in doing research with students and designing projects that allow students to make a contribution. Second, we must have students who are eager and able to work on the projects with the mentoring of our faculty. Third, we must have the facilities and the necessary equipment to perform the research. Fourth, we must have the time and money to allow the faculty and students to engage in this intensive learning environment.
We have an active and successful program, with many published papers co-authored by our undergraduate students. No two of our faculty do not use the same project designs or research methods. We view this diversity within our own discipline as a healthy environment that exposes students to more than one way of accomplishing a task, and leads naturally to collaborative solutions with teams of faculty and students working on projects.
The current foci of our faculty directed research projects are as follows (Brief statements of research interest are available on the Faculty & Staff page, and you can learn more on some professors’ personal web pages.):
- Asleson is studying the HPLC separation of newly discovered carbon compounds, fullerenes.
- Beam is developing new methods of preparation of heterocyclic compounds that have potential agricultural and medicinal use.
- Corey is studying the degration process and products of pharmaceuticals.
- Doig is working on new methods to determine enzyme functions.
- Donato is working on new methods of making fluorescent measurements of biomolecules.
- Heldrich is working on new methods for preparing organic compounds of industrial and medicinal interest.
- Kinard is working on new methods for the analysis of nuclear industry waste.
- Krantzman is using both ab initio calculations and molecular dynamics simulations to model gas-surface reactions.
- Lavrich is using micrwowave spectrosocpy to study a variety of moelcules.
- Metz is working on the chemistry of theoretical calculations of thermodynamic properties and X-ray crystallography.
- Riggs-Gelasco is interested in metal cluster assembly in enyzmes, x-ray absorption spectroscopy, EPR spectroscopy, and rapid kinetic techniques.
- Rogers is interested in the development of the introductory chemistry program and studies the mechanisms of various enzymatic systems.
- Straumanis is developing process oriented guided inquiry methodology to assist students in learning chemistry.
- Wyatt is working on the synthesis of novel antibiotics.
In addition to these major projects, students are designing their own projects and faculty/student teams are collaborating with scientists from other disciplines to solve intriguing problems.