A Glimpse Into Summer Internships

September 19 was an evening filled with summer internship presentations, delicious soup, and good company for the Chemistry Department. Five of our upperclassmen shared a brief overview of the work that they did this summer. Other students, as well as the department staff, came together to enjoy homemade soup and hear about the various jobs in the Chemistry world that our students were able to experience.

Brielle accepted a second summer REU through Princeton and worked on a computational project in the Czech Republic this summer. Crown ether conformations were investigated as models to look at synergistic binding in more complicated systems and the effects they have on each other.

Danya's summer internship experience was at Pharmachem technologies. Here, she worked alongside chemists in the process development area to ensure the plant manufacturing process was efficient as possible. She synthesized compounds and carried out testing on products made in the lab and in the plant. 

This summer, Julia worked in the Hofferberth Laboratory at Kenyon College to optimize the synthesis of precursors in an acid-catalyzed vinylogous aldol reaction to form all carbon quaternary steroecenters.

Nathanael Boone did research a Taylor this summer with Dr. Hammond. He worked at improving the ion exchange chromatography steps in particular for LDH isolation, a procedure that is used in biochemistry lab. This change was necessary because the isoelectric point is different in chicken than the beef heart originally used.

George Gray did a second year of research with Dr. Hammond and succeeded in showing that a Western Blot could be visualized with a DSLR camera and compare favorably with a much more expensive Li-Cor scanner.