Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe was awarded an allocation of supercomputing time on the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in Austin. It's a grant that allows him and the students in his group to access this very powerful resource -- it will help them to carry out their simulations at a much faster rate than they could with the current on-campus resources. More ...

Newly hired Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe became acquainted with Hamilton College before he even arrived. This summer, he and Hamilton student Sam Cho ’10 participated in biophysical chemistry research at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where Van Wynsberghe was an NIH Kirschstein post-doctoral fellow. He says the experience was “good for both parties” in that while Cho familiarized himself with the sort of research that could consume his career after Hamilton, Van Wynsberghe became acclimated to the Hamilton community through Cho. 
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Following pregnancy, women sometimes have a high concentration of what is known as alpha-fetoprotein, a protein found in blood plasma and produced in the yolk sac and liver during the fetal stage of development. Previous studies have shown that the alpha-fetoprotein has pronounced affects against breast cancer, and therefore women who have had multiple births might be less at risk. This summer Nathaniel Taylor ’11 looked at two sub-derivatives (small pieces) of alpha-fetoprotein, Peptides TPVNP and STPNVP to see if the properties they possess could be extracted for pharmaceutical purposes. He worked on the research with Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry Robin Kinnel. More ...

Piscidins are potent biological substances. Classified as antimicrobial peptides, they naturally fight off infection in organisms like the hybrid striped bass, among others. There are four members of the family of piscidins that Billy Wieczorek ’11 is studying this summer. Piscidin-1 has been the subject of myriad other studies, and although it has many antimicrobial properties, it can be harmful to human blood cells because it cannot differentiate between bacterial and mammalian cells. More ...

As a high school student, Keith Willner ’11 was very interested in chemistry but had no interest in going to Hamilton because he was a local student and felt it was too close to home. “My parents dragged me on a tour of campus.” But as soon as he entered the Science Center, with its towering glass windows and immaculate, well-equipped labs, his sullen attitude went away. “I was hooked,” he said. Now Willner is a budding chemist working for the Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry Robin Kinnel. The goal of his research this summer is to establish that the (-) enantiomer of germacrene D is the principal chemical signal for feeding and egg laying in the female Phyciodes tharos (Pearl Crescent) butterfly.  More ...

Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the flagship journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper titled “High Resolution Heteronuclear Correlation NMR Spectroscopy of an Antimicrobial Peptide in Aligned Lipid Bilayers: Peptide-Water Interactions at the Water-Bilayer Interface” is co-authored with two undergraduatesas well as Dr. Riqiang Fu, a research scientist at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee. More ...

Robin Kinnel, the Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry, presented a poster titled "The Chemistry of Aster prenanthoides: An Unexpected Encounter with a Polyacetylenic Hydrocarbon" at the meeting of the American Society of Pharmacognosy. Thomas Irvin '09 co-authored the paper. The scientific work detailed in the poster was largely taken from Irvin's thesis. More ...

Professor of Chemistry Tim Elgren and Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten participated in a Council on Undergraduate Research annual business meeting from June 18-20, that gathered councilors from diverse academic disciplines at Montana State University in Bozeman. More ...

Jason McGavin '12 and Matthew Baxter '11 understand that a peptide's structure can say a lot about how it functions in the body. This summer, they are studying two versions of the peptide Piscidin – Piscidin 1 and Piscidin 3. They will work alongside Associate Professor of Chemistry Myriam Cotten, whose previous work in this field has illustrated that there is a distinct difference between them.  More ...