Alysha Dicke ('10) presents her research at the ACS national meeting
Last week, I spent several days at the American Chemical Society national meeting in San Francisco with current senior Alysha Dicke. This conference is very large– more than 17,000 attendees were there giving more than 12,000 presentations, so it’s an amazing place to learn about a lot of chemical research.
Alysha has been working in my research lab for more than 2 years– for the past year our research together has been supported by a Gustavus Presidential Faculty/Student Collaboration Grant, and a grant from the local Sigma Xi chapter. Her presentation at this conference was a poster on our results from this most recent project. (“Dependence of myohemerythrin folding on iron oxidation state.”) The quality of Alysha’s work was recognized with a student travel award from the Division of Inorganic Chemistry. A Student Conference Travel award from the Provost’s office further supported this trip. You can see Alysha’s poster and talk with her about this work at the Celebration of Creative Inquiry later this month.
While we were there, I gave an oral presentation on the research that I have been doing in collaboration with Alysha and other Gustavus students. (“Role of metal type and oxidation state in myohemerythrin folding and metal site assembly.”)
Emily Pelton ('08) at her poster at the ACS national meeting
Large meetings like this are always a good time to catch up with people you haven’t seen in a while. At the inorganic chemistry poster session, I ran into Emily Pelton (’08) who is doing some excellent work with Kris McNeill at the University of Minnesota. Near the end, Sean Evanson (’06) and Ryan Schwiderski (’06) stopped by Alysha’s poster and report that they are doing well in the lab of Seth Rasmussen at North Dakota State University. Finally, though I didn’t get to see her, I learned that Audrey Schenewerk (’07) is working in the research group of an old friend of mine, Steve Berry at University of Minnesota, Duluth.