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SMCM Faculty and Staff Working to Transform Undergraduate Research

November 12, 2018

St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM) was well represented and very well received at the second annual meeting of the Council on Undergraduate Research Transformations Project (CUR-T), funded by the National Science Foundation (Award no. 1625354). The inter-disciplinary SMCM team attending the conference included Drs. Mertz, Neiles, Bowers, Dillingham, Wooley, Koenig, and Foster.

SMCM faculty and staff at the November 2018 CUR conference

SMCM CUR Transformations Project Team Members at 2018 Conference (L to R: Drs. Mertz, Neiles, Bowers, Dillingham, Wooley, Koenig, and Foster)

The CUR Transformations Project aims to understand and incorporate successful strategies to integrate high-quality undergraduate research (UGR) throughout four-year undergraduate STEM curricula. SMCM’s contribution to this ambitious nation-wide endeavor focuses on undergraduate research integration in the disciplines of psychology and chemistry & biochemistry, and we have a committed team of 16 faculty and administrators working toward this goal.

The 2018 annual meeting allowed all 12 institutions participating in the CUR-T project to highlight their progress toward achieving project goals, and by all accounts our SMCM psychology and chemistry/biochemistry teams excelled and impressed. Congratulations to all of them, and please feel free to ask them about their CUR-T-related progress and insights. Each team works to create a more research-rich, connected, and scaffolded curriculum, and contributes to two major research questions: 1) What effect do student characteristics (e.g., preexisting academic preparation) have on scaffolded integration of UGR into the curriculum and student learning outcomes? 2) How do different STEM disciplines/departments effectively integrate the components and outcomes of high-quality UGR to reach more students? The CUR-T principal investigators received NSF funding to answer these pertinent questions in order to advance the academy’s understanding of effective teaching and learning and the disciplinary and cultural factors necessary for curricular integration and transformation. Collectively, we are at the cutting edge of STEM curricular transformations.

: SMCM Team Members Presenting at the Conference

SMCM Chemistry CUR Conference Poster

SMCM Psychology CUR Conference Poster

SMCM Student awarded Summer UMD UAS Internship!

June 14, 2018

Dr. Townsend and SMCM student David Gerrish

David Gerrish, an undergraduate physics major at St. Mary’s College of Maryland (SMCM), will be the first SMCM student to undertake a summer internship at the new Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) Test Site located at the St. Mary’s Airport in California, MD. Under the mentorship of Dr. Troy Townsend, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Materials Science at SMCM, David will be using Computer Aided Design (CAD) to build 3-D printed unmanned aircraft and test their performance at the University of Maryland UAS Test Site. This full-time 11-week internship is traditionally awarded to students attending the University of Maryland, College Park Engineering Program or the College of Southern Maryland Engineering or Computer Science Programs.

According to the UAS website, “UAS Test Site summer internships give students an opportunity to work hands-on with researchers and staff on the modeling, design, analysis, simulation, assembly, and experimentation of UAS. As members of the test site team, summer interns work full-time from offices in California, MD and … [conclude the internship] with a briefing to advisors and UAS Test Site staff on project outcomes. The Unmanned Aircraft Systems Test Site at the University of Maryland stands at the forefront of UAS rulemaking, commercialization, and national airspace integration. Formed in 2014, Test Site experts leverage their approximately 150 years of combined experience in military and civilian aviation, engineering, and project management to accelerate the safe, responsible application of UAS in public and private industries.”

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is Maryland’s Public Honors College and is heralded as one of the nation’s top public liberal arts colleges. David’s internship award is a testament to the quality of the applied science component of the SMCM student liberal arts experience. Dr. Townsend says, “One of St. Mary’s greatest values is student research. Every student is required to complete a senior capstone project to culminate their interdisciplinary studies, and I have a team of students who start in lab with directed research in their first two years of college. The applied nature of our research has initiated partnerships with the Navy and commercial partners, where our undergraduate students are conducting PhD level research. Projects like David’s are super cool and could lead to exciting opportunities with new discoveries in technology.”

St. Mary’s College Participates in Council on Undergraduate Research Transformations Project

October 31, 2017

Pamela Mertz, Professor of Chemistry and CBC Chair, with St. Mary’s College students

The Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) Transformations Project will kick off this weekend, October 27-29, at The College of New Jersey, where the CUR-recruited consultants and departmental teams will begin their sustained work together for the next four years. Attending the meeting on behalf of St. Mary’s College is administrative co-lead of the project, Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum, and departmental co-leads Aileen Bailey, Pamela Mertz, and Kelly Neiles.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland is one of only 12 institutions selected by CUR for its Transformations Project, funded by the National Science Foundation. The Transformations Project will revise traditional four-year undergraduate curricula in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology by focusing on high-quality undergraduate research throughout the four years of a student’s major. Participants from institutions around the country will directly engage in novel research to study the student, faculty, departmental, and disciplinary influences on the process of integrating and scaffolding undergraduate research experiences throughout the curriculum in two of the four possible disciplines.

A team of 16 faculty and staff members at St. Mary’s College are participating, including principal investigator and co-lead Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs.

The full team is comprised of:

Michael Wick, provost and dean of faculty
Anne Marie Himmelheber Brady, director of the office of institutional research
Pamela Mertz, CBC’s chair & professor of chemistry
Kelly Neiles, assistant professor of chemistry
Andrew Koch, professor of chemistry
Randolph Larsen, professor of chemistry
Daniel Chase, assistant professor of chemistry
Geoffrey Bowers, assistant professor of chemistry
Aileen Bailey, Aldom-Planseon Honors College Professor of psychology
Nathaniel Foster, assistant professor of psychology
Cynthia Koenig, associate professor of psychology
James Mantell, assistant professor of psychology
Jennifer Tickle, associate professor of psychology
Elizabeth Nutt Williams, professor of psychology & chair of the psychology department
Christine Wooley, interim associate dean of curriculum
Sabine Loew Dillingham, director of the office of research & sponsored programs

SMCM Rising Senior Biochemistry Major Receives Research Award for Summer Project

May 4, 2017

SMCM student Elizabeth Johnson holds a white-throated sparrow

Elizabeth Johnson holds a white-throated sparrow on the St. Mary’s College of Maryland campus

Elizabeth Johnson, a rising senior biochemistry major, was awarded $1,000 from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) to support her 2017 summer research project. Johnson will be working on a cross-disciplinary project with Dr. Pamela Mertz, Chair and Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and Dr. Jessica Malisch, Assistant Professor of Biology, as part of SMCM’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). The title of her project is “Oh Say Can you CBG? A New Technique for Evaluating Stress Responses in Birds” which capitalizes on the expertise of biochemical mechanisms and methodology available in Dr. Mertz’s lab to help answer important biology research questions being explored in Dr. Malisch’s lab.

Corticosteroid binding globulin (CBG) is a protein involved in vertebrate animals’ response to stressors. CBG and the hormone corticosterone help coordinate organismal responses to changes in the environment, but most field biologists do not account for CBG due to difficulty obtaining accurate measurements. Johnson’s research as part of the SURF program in June and July, 2017 will attempt to make CBG quantification more practical. Better understanding of the role of CBG will help ecologists interpret physiological data collected in the field and may help lead to medical advances in treating human stress disorders.

The SURF program at SMCM involves students, mentored by a faculty member, engaging in scholarly or creative work for eight-weeks over the summer. The ASBMB is a nonprofit scientific and educational organization whose mission is to advance the science of biochemistry and molecular biology and to promote the understanding of the molecular nature of life processes.

SMCM Student Research Projects Generating Steady Interest

May 2, 2017

The team of student and professors working on vCalc projects

The team of students and professors working on vCalc projects

A grant jointly funded by the Maryland Industrial Partnerships program and vCalc LLC in 2016 continues to generate steady interest at vCalc.com. St. Mary’s College of Maryland was awarded $97,361 to support student projects for vCalc.

The Maryland Industrial Partnerships (MIPS) program promotes the development and commercialization of products and processes through industry/university research partnerships. MIPS provides matching funds to help Maryland companies pay for the university research. Projects are initiated by the companies to meet research and development goals.

vCalc (see 90 second YouTube video here) is a fast-growing calculator, equation and dataset library that helps users create, collaborate and quickly calculate. Topics range from complex scientific equations to practical everyday equations. vCalc has hundreds of calculators and thousands of equations created by engineers, professors and students from around the world.

The St. Mary’s research team developed equations for vCalc.com in math, chemistry, psychology, physics, and economics during the summer of 2016. The team was composed of students Caleb Svobodny, Austin Schlegel, Daria Vaseneva, Emma Skekel, Tyler Jones, Caroline Robertson, Savannah Bergen and Chris Lynch. Professors Emek Kose, Josh Grossman, Richard Platt, Randolph Larsen and Shizuka Nishikawa supported the project.

Kurt Heckman, president of vCalc, recently reported that several of the calculators created by SMCM students posted at vCalc.com are generating significant regular traffic to the site, including Savannah Bergen’s Characteristic Polynomial of a 3×3 matrix, which regularly gets used over 1,000 times per month, and Emma Skekel’s chemistry calculator to compute Kp from Kc, which sees 1,700 page hits per month, with an average time on page of 12 minutes and 38 seconds! According to Heckman, “that’s terrific engagement, and clearly an indication of how useful this calculator has become to chemistry students”.

Bowers and Research Student Selected for National Lab Program

April 2, 2017

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.

Image of shale with an inset of microscopic elements

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.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Continues Research for U.S. Department of Energy

February 14, 2017

Geoffrey M Bowers – Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Geoffrey Bowers, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, is continuing a long term collaboration with scientists at Michigan State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The research, for the U.S. Department of Energy, develops general principles for understanding the role natural solid surfaces play in our energy infrastructure.

Bowers recently received funding that will enhance new instrumentation in the SMCM museum studies’ program. He and his undergraduate researchers will use it to study how carbon-based molecules adhere to the surfaces of model and natural geological materials such as shale. They will also be able to examine how such materials decompose when exposed to heat.

“My collaborators at Michigan State and I have been working for the past seven years on understanding behaviors of molecules at places where solid surfaces and fluids (liquid or gas) meet out in the environment,” Bowers said.

Bowers said he and his collaborators are looking to identify the rules nature follows when a surface, like the outer surface of clay, comes in contact with fluid.

The College currently has a thermogravimetric analyzer/differential scanning calorimeter that will allow Bowers and colleagues to take composite materials and track the amount of mass lost at a given temperature and how much energy it took for it to happen.

Bowers said the TGA/DSC is a powerful instrument on its own but by attaching the output to an infrared spectrometer, they will be able to analyze and examine the chemistry of what is leaving the sample, an important component to their research.

Having a TGA/DSC integrated with an infrared spectrometer he said is “a unique feature for St. Mary’s College.” He suspects the number of non-research first institutions that have that kind of instrument and capability is “extraordinarily small.”

Bowers explained that this project is a building block in the creation of a macroscopic understanding of such things as pollutant transport, nutrient cycling, non-conventional gas extraction, and subsurface CO2 sequestration.

“Ultimately, predicting the fate and transport of contaminants in the soil or our watershed or even in the deep subsurface comes down to understanding the ways molecules interact with complex interfaces in complex fluids. We’re privileged to work on basic scientific questions that have practical impacts on society now and in the future. There are lots of great people working on these issues and I am happy that my undergraduate students and I can contribute to making the world a better place now and for generations to come,” he said.

St. Mary’s College of Maryland, designated the Maryland state honors college in 1992, is ranked one of the best public liberal arts schools in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Approximately 1,700 students attend the college, nestled on the St. Mary’s River in Southern Maryland.

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Science, Chemical, Geological, and Biological Sciences Program, under Award Number DE-FG02-08ER15929

This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes and warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.