Assistant Professor of Chemistry Geoff Bowers was recently named one of four faculty from across the nation that will be participating in the Visiting Faculty Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) this summer. This program is operated by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists in collaboration with the Department of Energy laboratories. The goal of the program is to bring faculty from institutions traditionally underrepresented in the research community to the national laboratories, expanding their workforce and giving faculty and their students opportunities to engage in and augment their professional scholarship. The competitive program requires a research proposal co-written with a PNNL scientist and involves working ten weeks this summer at the national lab.

Shale in central New York with an inset showing a colorized helium ion microscope image of clay with cartoons of carbon dioxide and methane

Dr. Bowers will be working with H. Todd Schaef and his collaborators studying the interactions of minerals and organic matter in the subsurface with supercritical methane and carbon dioxide, work relevant to non-conventional gas extraction and sequestration. One of Dr. Bowers’s research students, Sydney Cunniff ‘17, will also be at the lab this summer working with Dr. Schaef and colleagues through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internships program.