Hamilton College Professor and Chair of Chemistry George Shields attended the 43rd Sanibel Symposium on Atomic, Molecular, Biophysical and Condensed Matter Theory, February 26 - March 1, 2003, in St. Augustine, Florida. He chaired the plenary session on Membrane Proteins. In addition, three Hamilton College seniors presented their fundamental research focused on anti-cancer drug design, based on their senior thesis work. Matt Liptak '03 presented his poster, "Modeling the Inhibition of Cdc25B using QM/MM." Chantelle Rein '03 presented her poster, "An Investigation of the Usefulness of the ONIOM QM/MM Method for Studying the Energetic Pathways of Esperamicin A1." Sarah Taylor '03 presented her poster, "Computational Approaches to Breast Cancer Drug Design." Each student gave a brief talk before an international audience of over a hundred scientists, and then discussed their work with all interested scientists during the poster session. Sarah Tschampel, Hamilton College '00, currently a graduate student in computational biochemistry at the University of Georgia, won the award for top graduate student poster at the conference. All four of these students have spent multiple summers pursuing their research through the chemistry summer research program at Hamilton College.
The chemistry summer research program is an intensive ten week program, which provides students with interdisciplinary, hands-on, research projects. The Chemistry Department works with 25-40 Hamilton College undergraduates each summer; many of the students spend multiple summers working on research projects in biochemistry, chemistry, or chemical physics with chemistry faculty. Approximately 80 students work on science research projects at Hamilton in the summer, and all Hamilton science majors complete senior thesis research projects prior to graduation. Interested high school students should check the chemistry web site for further details (http://www.chem.hamilton.edu).
Shields teaching and research focuses on computational physical chemistry and structural biochemistry. He also examines solvation effects to determine better methods for the incorporation of solvation into computational chemistry. A major focus of his research is developing effective ways to design inhibitors against molecules that are active in cancer cells. He has research funding from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, ACS/PRF, Merck/AAAS, and New York State's Breast Cancer Research and Education program. His research efforts have led to more than 20 publications with undergraduate co-authors, and his undergraduates have made 35 presentations at national and international conferences.
