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There’s a great big world of off-campus studies, and it’s not just for art history or French majors. To help prove the point, biology major Angel Pichardo ’17 gave a talk at a recent Hamilton colloquium about his semester in DIS Copenhagen. His program focused on biomedicine and drug development. The experience, says Pichardo, was the best four months of his life.

Science students returned this fall to find a significant addition to the analytical capabilities of the Chemistry Department: a PerkinElmer AAnalyst 600 Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. The instrument, donated by ICON, plc, enables users to detect and quantify trace elements in water, soil and sediments, and other matrices.

For Mary Langworthy ’17 and Mary Margaret Allen ’17, the geology trip to Turkana, Kenya, was not only a great research experience, but also a true adventure.

Marcos Ferreccio ’17 and Alex Cornwell ’17 spent this summer building and optimizing an electron spin resonance (ESR) magnetometer.

In 2016, the American Cancer Association expects 62,450 new cases of thyroid cancer with approximately 2,000 deaths. Although anaplastic thyroid cancer (ATC) is fairly rare, representing approximately 5% of thyroid cancer, it is also one of the deadliest forms of cancer, with most patients dying within 6 months of diagnosis. Martina Brave’17 got the opportunity this summer to explore the mechanisms behind thyroid cancer, as part of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP). 

Four students presented their computational chemistry research during the 15th Annual Molecular Educational Research Consortium in Undergraduate computational chemistRY (MERCURY) conference.

Emma Anderson ’17 has always been fascinated by biology. She is planning to pursue a graduate degree in a nutrition-related field, and hopes to have a positive impact on the health and well-being of others through her career. This summer, Anderson was selected for the Summer Student Program at The Jackson Laboratory, a non-profit biomedical research institution located in Bar Harbor, Maine. It’s been a great opportunity for her to explore her interests and learn about the potential career path of a biomedical researcher.

After watching the documentary Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies and having family members battle with cancer, Joana Mora’18 was determined to play a role in cancer research. This summer, under the advisement of Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Mark Sasaki, she studied cancer by looking into whether RNF43, a protein coding gene mutated in many types of cancers, is a transcriptional target of p53, a tumor suppressor gene. Understanding their relationship helps explain how various forms of cancer begin.

Lyndsay LaBarge ’17 and Maya Montgomery ’18 spent this summer working on the design and implementation of CSPy, a variation of the programming language Python. The research is under the supervision of Associate Professor of Computer Science Alistair Campbell.

In recent years, Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) has become valuable because it allows for the cost effective, rapid detection of small molecules without destroying or altering them. Particularly, in biology and chemistry fields, it allows one to identify biological samples like DNA and proteins, detect trace levels of explosives, and can be used in medical diagnostics.