Winslow Professor and Chair of Chemistry George Shields and Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry Karl Kirschner attended the 45th Sanibel Symposium on Atomic, Molecular, Biophysical, and Condensed Matter Theory, March 5 - 10, at St. Simons Island, Ga. They were accompanied by their research students, Tim Evans '05, Katrina Lexa '05, Frank Pickard '05 and Meghan Dunn '06. Lexa won the award for top undergraduate student poster at the conference.
The group presented the following posters at this international symposium that featured speakers from all over the world.
- Tim Evans, "Investigation of Atmospherically Relevant Sulfur Species Complexed with Small Water Clusters," co-authored with Greg Hartt '08, Dan Tomb '08, and Professors Kirschner and Shields.
- Katrina Lexa, "Finding Energy Minima for a Breast Cancer Inhibiting Peptide derived from AFP" co-authored with her two professors.
- Frank Pickard, "The Enediyne Anticancer Antibiotics: A Study of the Bergman Cyclization Energy Barriers of Esperamicin A1", co-authored with Chantelle Rein '03 and Professor Shields.
- Meghan Dunn, "Structures, Thermodynamics, and Abundances of Neutral and Ionic Clusters in the Atmosphere," co-authored with Frank Pickard and her two professors.
- Karl Kirschner presented on behalf of Ashley Deline '06 and Meghan Dunn. Deline and Dunn developed this work in their physical chemistry laboratory during this academic year, and their poster, "A Dynamics Study on the Diffusion of Water through Pristine and Molecularly Altered Nanotubes" was co-authored with Kirschner.
Each student gave a brief talk before an international audience of more than 100 scientists, and then discussed their work during the poster session. Their posters were of graduate level quality and the students impressed the faculty in attendance. All of these students have spent one or more summers pursuing their research through the chemistry summer research program at Hamilton College.
The three seniors are currently completing Honors senior theses projects. The chemistry summer research program is an intensive 10-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. In May the Chemistry department moved into a new $60 million state-of-the-art science complex.
Approximately 70 students work on science research projects at Hamilton during 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 focus is computational physical chemistry, atmospheric 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 Research Corporation, the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, and the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society. His research efforts have led to more than 25 publications with undergraduate co-authors, and his undergraduates have made 66 presentations at national and international conferences.
Kirschner, a former undergraduate researcher with Shields from 1992-95, made the very first presentation by an undergraduate at this same meeting in 1994. He is currently teaching physical chemistry and helping direct research projects in the Shields group. He is an expert on molecular dynamics simulations and carbohydrate structure and function.
