Finding UAF undergraduates who are conducting original research isn’t at all difficult. Students across campus work with UAF researchers to get a taste of hands-on research beyond the concepts learned from textbooks and lectures.

Even the number of students gaining this kind of experience—about 400 at UAF— is no longer unusual considering that over the last 15 years research experience during undergraduate study has become an expectation for graduate school applications, not just an enriching summer experience for those with the time and finances. But what’s fun about finding these students is the excitement one sees in their advisors, who seem to draw on the youthful energy of their students and who beam with pride as they tell you about their students’ unique accomplishments.

Catherine Cahill of the chemistry department is known on campus as a professor who is deeply involved in K-12 and undergraduate research. Stepping into her lab, one gets the sense of the pride Cahill takes in her students. Two young women are hard at work wrapping up a summer of research; they pause to chat with Cahill as she excitedly explains the different pieces of equipment in the room. Cahill jokes with the students about various frustrations of their work while giving gentle suggestions for changes or perfections.

One of these students is Mitali Patil, a sophomore who is working with Cahill to develop new, more portable methods to measure air quality. Patil demonstrates her work by setting up a sampler that pulls air from the parking lot behind the International Arctic Research Center, grabbing particles of dirt, smog, bacteria and other contaminants. The vacuum pulls in the air while a motor turns a drum inside the device. The contaminants get stuck in strips on the paper along the outside of the drum, and can then be measured in the laboratory and identified.

“We’re going to purchase several dyes and culture them on plates. By using the dyes we hope to see if we can identify which ones are bacteria or viruses or fungi,” explains Patil. “Then we’re going to see if we can use strips of dye on each of the strips on the drum. One line would be a dye that catches fungi, one that catches bacteria and so on. Then on the second half we will leave the strips blank. We want to see if we can identify the particles while they are on the strips rather than having to do the culturing part of the experiment.”

This project caught Patil’s eye, she says, because a more portable system could be used to scan the air in remote locations or in the field.

“Like in the military, for instance,” says Patil. “Before they send their troops to a certain area, if they want to scan the air and see what their troops might be exposed to, then they could use this kind of portable drum.”

So, what does Patil think about doing research so early in her schooling?

“It can be frustrating at times,” she laughs. “Like trying to find a particular material or reaching a dead end and realizing no one has ever ventured there before. But overall it does make me feel good to know that I’m doing something new, and thinking outside the box a bit.”

A short way down the hill from Patil, Bronwyn Harrod works under the direction of John Keller of the Chemistry Department on a computational chemistry project.

“She was the top student in Chemistry 105 and Chemistry 106 last year, and won the Chemistry Department’s Elaine Jacobson Scholarship given to an outstanding chemistry student from Fairbanks,” Keller rattles off on Harrod’s first introduction. “She took first-year chemistry and calculus as a high school senior and also started a research project in my lab.”

Indeed, Harrod is not your typical college student. After literally traveling the world and homeschooling with her family, Harrod entered the Alaska Higher Education Admission Decision program at UAF. Called AHEAD, the program allows students to complete their final year of high school at UAF, simultaneously completing high school and earning college credits. At 18, she has just completed a year in the AHEAD program as a math/chemistry double major and is conducting research in the Chemistry Department.

“I knew that I wanted to do something in the sciences,” says Harrod. “When I came up here originally I declared math as a major because I knew that no matter where I went in science I wanted it to have a lot of math in it. But I was torn between chemistry and physics. I took Chemistry 105/106, and Dr. Keller was my professor. He suggested that I look into doing an independent study lab.”

Under the supervision of Keller, Harrod is gaining valuable hands-on experience with chemistry concepts while she learns in the classroom. She’s also getting an opportunity to use the supercomputing resources at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center.

“Dr. Keller and I are doing a computational chemistry and spectroscopic project trying to find one or more sulfur dioxide-formic acid complexes in the gas phase,” explains Harrod. “First, we use computer modeling to optimize different combinations of a sulfur dioxide molecule and a formic acid molecule to see which ones turn out to be a stable bond. The computer part comes first. That’s how we identified that the complex existed. Then the experimental portion was to try and find spectroscopic evidence of what we found on the computer.”

This is an original pair of molecules that hasn’t been studied before as a complex. These molecules occur both in planetary atmospheres and in interstellar environments, so they are actually in contact. Even on Earth, two of the gases most present in volcano emissions are sulfur dioxide and formic acid. So it helps to see if they interact and if they do, to what extent and what the result might be.

“So far we’ve found that it’s actually a relatively weak bond, but there is still definitely a bond between the two. It would take further study to see how that might affect other things as far as the atmosphere or another gas being present that may change because of the complex being present.”

Harrod recently presented her work at the Mercury Conference on Computational Chemistry. Going to the conference, she says, helped her get a better feeling for just how huge a field computational chemistry is.

Harrod seems to have kept her cool in her approach to school and research, though.

“There’s a really important balance between the research and the regular classes,” explains Harrod. “I wouldn’t be as far in my research if I had tried to go forward without having a background in it. The classroom is a fundamental part of learning, but the research did a lot more in teaching me where I want to go.”

To learn more about undergraduate research opportunities on the UAF campus, including the annual Undergraduate Research Symposium sponsored by the Center for Research Services, visit www.uaf.edu/research.

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