Here’s the seventh and final installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Lori Banks, an assistant professor of biology who encourages her students’ to lead with their hearts and hands.
• Andrew Kennedy, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry whose students have a certain glow.
• Jennifer Koviach-Côté, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry who carries the many languages of chemistry with her.
• Jason Castro, an associate professor of neuroscience who has a nose for his research.

Lori Banks

Title: Assistant Professor of Biology

Joined �ֲ���ý: 2019

Date Photographed: Nov. 30 and Dec. 3

She says: “When you put the right opportunity in front of a student, you see their personality change.”

Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks teaches in a Bonney Science Center classroom and conducts research in a Bonney lab. But the science she pursues is everywhere, “whether it’s mathematical modeling or physics in a pressure cooker in somebody’s kitchen.”

In her lab, Lori Banks and her student researchers explore preclinical drug development, “mostly in the area of antimicrobials for both bacteria and viruses,” she says. “I’m sort of a hybrid microbiologist / biochemist.” 

Among her current projects is one looking at the workings of a specific non-structural protein in rotavirus. (Viruses use non-structural protein to replicate themselves, among other purposes.)

In the classroom, Banks teaches courses that explore the cellular basis of life as well as cellular biochemistry and microbiology. Next fall, she’ll teach one of the department’s new CURE courses, delivering a Course-Based Research Experience, looking at microbes.  

As a teacher, Banks says she “definitely draws a lot from Ms. Frizzle,” referencing the fictional elementary school teacher of The Magic School Bus edutainment fame. (Fun fact: The theme song for the TV series was sung by Little Richard.)

“She’s just sort of this free spirit science teacher whose magic bus can take her class out to space or shrink them and let them watch molecules interact inside of a baking cake.”

Silly stuff, but serious intent. “To encourage people to do stuff, get your hands in it. Let them get messy. That’s how you’re really going to learn things and retain the information.”

To that end, Banks’ cellular biochemistry last fall had a heaping helping of community engagement, as the students helped a Lewiston Middle School class learn about the value of a healthy, vitamin-rich diet. The course culminated in a recipe contest, the youngsters choosing an omelet dish as their favorite. 

Banks also works with the STEM Scholars program, which helps students from underrepresented groups who are interested in pursuing science or math begin to think like, and believe in themselves as young scientists.

The best part about teaching, Banks says, is providing what she calls a “landing pad, a safe environment for them to screw up some stuff and figure it out.”

The Banks landing pad means that a student, after failing, can back up and try again or try something new. “You see a student trudge through a few things for a couple of weeks, and they’ll say, ‘That’s really not my jam. I don’t ever want to do this again.”

Banks will talk with the discouraged student, giving them a chance to reflect on what happened. From that, Banks might suggest a different area of science. 

“And when you put the right opportunity in front of them, you just see their whole personality change. They’re like, ‘I didn’t know they made this part of science before, but I’m glad they did. I want to go play!’”

Andrew Kennedy

Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Joined �ֲ���ý: 2016

Date Photographed: Nov. 17, 2021

He says: “�ֲ���ý students can walk right over to their own high-field NMR instrument and analyze their own data.”

The newspaper story was incredulous: “Put one drop of blood in a barrel of water and toxicologist, Joseph B. Swim, San Francisco toxicologist, can detect it. He uses 3- aminophthalhydrazide. He can even pronounce it!”

That was in 1937, when crime investigators first began using the chemical compound, commonly known as luminol (not to be confused with the barbiturate Luminal) to detect blood at crime scenes. Luminol is chemiluminescent, meaning it glows when it chemically reacts to something, in this case the iron in hemoglobin. 

As the 1937 story noted, and Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew Kennedy confirms today, “even small amounts of iron will emit light, making the presence of blood easy to detect.”

On a Wednesday afternoon last November, Kennedy was teaching his organic chemistry students how to synthesize their own batches of luminol, a multistep process involving a few chemicals plus heat. 

As he moved about the lab, he stopped to guide Oli Seline ’24 of Delaware, Ohio, with her experimental setup, specifically how to correctly position her reaction tube, like a test tube, over a Bunsen burner.

Later, in a darkened area just off the first-floor teaching laboratory of the Bonney Science Center, Jake Johnson ’24 of Lake Forest Park, Wash., tested whether the luminol he had synthesized in the teaching lab would successfully detect iron.

And it did. As he poured mixtures from two beakers, one containing luminol and the other an iron complex, into a funnel, the mixture began glowing as it flowed into a larger beaker. Seeing was believing for Johson. “It was fascinating to see an actual reaction,” said Johnson.

The sophomores that Kennedy worked with last November may someday be the juniors and seniors who join Kennedy’s lab, which seeks to better understand the chemical mechanisms that encode and maintain long-term memory. The lab also works to create new molecules, such as Bobcat339, that possess epigenetic properties,, that govern the function of genes, including those related to memory loss.

When Kennedy taught undergraduate organic chemistry at his Ph.D. institution, “students didn’t even get to analyze samples,” he says, partly due to numbers and partly because undergraduates didn’t rate. “There were too many of them, and the important equipment for organic analysis, like nuclear magnetic resonance instruments, were exclusively used for the graduate-level research projects.”

Now, he says, “�ֲ���ý students can walk right over to their own high-field NMR instrument, load their own reaction sample, and analyze their own data.”

(Fun fact: The NMR in Bonney was made possible by Dennis Keith ’65 and Jo-Linda Leib Keith. Dennis was a chemistry major who earned a Ph.D. from Yale and had a long and successful pharmaceutical career. “Dennis took organic chemistry when Hedge Hall was the chemistry building,” says Kennedy. “He remembers Dana Chemistry Hall as a hole in the ground. It’s pretty incredible that he would be connected to the Bonney Science Center in this way.”)

Jennifer Koviach-Côté

Title: Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry

Joined �ֲ���ý: 2001

Date Photographed: Nov. 16, 2021

She says: “Having the decal provides continuity between students who have worked in my lab in the past with students of the future.”

In Dana Chemistry Hall, now in the finishing stages of a year-long renovation to become a science teaching space, the old fume hoods have been replaced with new ductless hoods that use replaceable charcoal filters. 

The new hoods filter the fumage instead of piping fumes out of the building. The innovation will reduce HVAC costs because air won’t have to be cooled or heated as it’s brought into the building to replace the exhausted air. 

But a bit of �ֲ���ý chemistry history has been lost. Well, almost lost.

Around 15 years ago, a tradition was born when students of Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Jennifer Koviach-Côté’s students began to use Sharpies to write the word “chemistry”on the lab’s fume hood in the language of their home or heritage.

The Japanese word for chemistry kicked it off:

Over time, other students from other countries followed: Nepali, Russian, Korean, Spanish, French, Swahili, Hindi, Singhalese, Hebrew, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Irish Gaelic, English, German, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Vietnamese, and Burmese.

That word-strewn hood is gone, but not forgotten. Last year, Koviach-Côté’s thesis students gave her a lab-warming gift: a decal created from a photo of all the “chemistry” translations from the old sash. 

“Having the decal provides continuity between students who have worked in my lab in the past with students of the future,” she says.

Koviach-Côté teaches one of the mainstays of the departments’ offerings, organic chemistry. She also teaches an upper-level course that teaches students how to use two powerful tools, nuclear magnetic resonance and mass spectrometry, to glimpse and analyze the inner workings of molecules.

Koviach-Côté’s lab, meanwhile, synthesizes (creates, that is) and investigates organic molecules and carbohydrate-containing compounds. “We study compounds with antioxidant activity and others with antiviral activity,” she explains. “One compound is active against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) which mostly affects infants.”

On a Tuesday morning in November, four of her five thesis students were at work in the lab, including Sean Agrodnia ’22 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine. 

For his senior thesis, done in collaboration with Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Colleen O’Loughlin — “who now works down the hall from me,” says  Koviach-Côté — Agrodnia investigated the antibacterial properties of phenylpropanoid glycosides, which are . (Fun fact: PPGs can be found in gingko trees, several of which were planted just outside Bonney.)

When asked what’s better about her new lab, Koviach-Côté says, “Space. More elbow room to have multiple experiments at the same time and accommodate more students to work in the lab at the same time.”

And better HVAC, which benefits humans and chemistry alike. “It means that experiments are performed at consistent temperatures regardless of the season.”

Jason Castro

Title: Associate Professor of Neuroscience

Joined �ֲ���ý: 2012

Date Photographed: April 1, 2022

He says: “Now I’m spoiled.”

Payette, the architectural firm that designed Bonney Science Center, had a specific purpose in mind for most spaces: teaching, research, office work, or storage.

But there are some purposefully purposeless spaces, like Room 283, where �ֲ���ý folks can meet, discuss, laugh, and figure things out.

On April 1, the room was the scene for a lively meeting between Associate Professor of Neuroscience Jason Castro and two of his thesis students, Johnny Loftus ’22 of Palo Alto, Calif., and Juliet Bockhorst ’22 of Westwood, Mass.

There were some light moments as the trio used the whiteboard to sketch out some charts reflecting the work the students were doing in “principal component analysis,” an important technique in statistics and data science.

After a difficult, month-long project, the two “had identified what might be two new cellular subtypes,” explains Castro, “using machine-learning techniques to determine whether these cells could be classified into different types.”

He doesn’t recall the reason for the levity. “Juliet may have been talking about some of the challenges she faced when trying to label neurons” — which was key to the project — “and was making light of it.”

Castro’s lab researches how we smell. (Not if we’re smelly, but how our olfactory system works.)

Take the various and tantalizing smells that hit �ֲ���ý students as they walk toward Commons for a meal. Whether it’s the allure of barbecue tempe, bacon and ham pizza, paprika braised mushrooms, or tiramisu coffee cake, it’s simply chemicals hitting and stimulating the collective �ֲ���ý nose.

“Although we know we can smell a huge number of volatile chemicals, we still don’t understand exactly how this information is handled by the olfactory bulb – the part of the brain that receives incoming signals about smells,” Castro says.

He and his students are testing the idea that there are different sub-divisions within the olfactory system — or “noses within the nose” that are each specialized for smelling different classes of chemicals. 

Before moving to Bonney, Castro had two workplaces: His office in Hathorn Hall, and his lab in Carnegie Science Hall. “I was constantly running back and forth across campus. Now I’m spoiled — the lab is just a few paces away from my office.”

Here’s the sixth installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Paula Schlax, a chemistry and biochemistry professor who deems the Lyme bacteria “pretty amazing.”
• Ryan Bavis, a biology professor whose honors thesis student has ants in their plans.
• Larissa Williams, a biology professor delivering a CURE for first-year �ֲ���ý students.

Paula Schlax

Title: Stella James Sims Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 1998
Date Photographed: Feb. 10, 2022
She says: “I really love working with our students.” 

There are umpteen good reasons for a �ֲ���ý student to meet one-on-one with their professor, including this example: Casey Kelemen ’22 meets with Paula Schlax in her office on Feb. 10 to prep for his thesis presentation to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Senior chemistry and biochemistry majors are required to make two seminar presentations of their thesis work. Students call it a “cheminar” or “biocheminars.” (Fun fact: The clever portmanteau “cheminar” was used as far back as 1938 by Bethel College in Kansas to describe, you guessed it, presentations by senior chemistry majors.)

Kelemen’s thesis work reflects the major thrust of the Schlax lab, which is to investigate the spiral bacteria that causes Lyme disease, Borrelia burgdorferi. “It’s pretty long and ridiculously narrow,” is how Schlax describes it.

Schlax holds a grudging admiration for the tiny organism. “Really pretty amazing,” she says. While the genome of B. burgdorferi and similar spiral bacteria, known as spirochetes, were sequenced in the 1990s, even today “we still don’t know what some of their genes do.”

In nature, B. burgdorferi is found almost entirely in deer ticks. When an infected tick bites a dog, cat, squirrel, or human, the bacteria gets its meal ticket — a blood meal, that is. And when they feed, things start to happen inside the tick.

“The temperature that the bacteria experiences in the tick changes. Different nutrients are around. The acidity and salt concentration changes,” says Schlax. “All those things give the bacteria an idea that it’s time to grow up and move out.” Move out of the tick, that is, and move into the mammal.

As part of the moving-out process, the bacteria stops making certain proteins that have helped it bind to the tick host, and start making new ones — at least 100 new proteins to get ready for the new host.

“I’m interested in how this process happens,” Schlax says. “What are the molecular switches that allow that to occur?” She says the answers are probably related to messenger RNA, made famous by their use in COVID-19 vaccines. 

Schlax isn’t asking these questions alone: “My students study this with me,” she says, including Casey, who is researching novel imaging techniques to visualize the localization of mRNA within B. burgdorferi. Schlax is impressed by her seniors’ work this year. “They’ve helped the lab define the strengths and limitations for how we can monitor gene expression in real time in B. burgdorferi,” she says.

Reacting to another photo taken the same day, Schlax is asked what she was thinking at that moment. “Probably that I needed a hair tie,” she says wryly.

She was helping a student set up an observation of how specific RNA molecules spread out within bacterial cells, and how that might be related to how the RNA is used by the cell, and recycled back into its building blocks.” 

The lab’s work to better understand the workings of B. burgdorferi is helping to inform the design of better diagnostic and treatment strategies. And for Schlax, there’s joy in the work itself. 

“I really love working with our students.”

Ryan Bavis

Title: Helen A. Papaioanou Professor of Biological Sciences
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2003
Date Photographed: Nov. 9, 2021
He says: “This is a more collaborative environment.”

We learned over the winter that Bonney Science Center, the newest and most modern building at �ֲ���ý, has ants.

Specifically, there’s Lasius nearcticus, the yellow meadow ant, and Tetramorium immigrans,  the pavement ant. But we don’t need to pester the local pest services for a Bonney call just yet.

The critters are part of honors thesis research by biology major Etti Cooper ’22 of Denver, Colo., whose adviser is Ryan Bavis, Helen A. Papaioanou Professor of Biological Sciences.

Cooper has been investigating how temperature changes might differently affect pavement ants, which spend their lives above ground, and the entirely subterranean meadow ant.

Cooper didn’t have to go far to collect her specimens. The pavement ants came from, well pavement: the sidewalk outside Carnegie Science Hall. And the meadow ants came from, well, a meadowish place, around Mount David.

But because ants refuse to wear name tags, Cooper spent careful time in the lab confirming the taxonomic identification of her specimens, i.e., whether the ants actually were who Cooper thought they were. 

“It’s difficult to tell some species apart, even under the microscope,” explains Bavis. Although Bavis and Cooper were confident of their identification, Cooper sent a few specimens off to an expert at Providence College, James Waters — whose — to confirm the identification. (This spring, Waters was the outside examiner in Cooper’s thesis defense.)

Cooper compared changes in the metabolism of the two species when exposed to temperature changes. “Like other animals, they consume oxygen and produce carbon dioxide through their metabolism,” says Bavis. “So we were measuring the rate at which carbon dioxide was being produced to see how sensitive they are to changes in temperature.” 

Bavis is a respiratory physiologist whose primary research looks at how the nervous system controls breathing in mammals and birds, specifically the changes that occur in breathing around birth and how environmental conditions influence development of the respiratory control system.

“I know almost nothing about ants,” he admits. But as part of a major redesign of the college’s antiquated introductory biology curriculum (see the profile of biologist Larissa Williams, below) Bavis will teach a new, innovative intro course this fall that gives young �ֲ���ý students real research experience by exploring how insects may respond to climate change.

 “Etti’s interest in ants and my interests in all-things-physiology converged this year,” Bavis says. 

In Bonney, Bavis shares a spacious lab with two �ֲ���ý neuroscientists whose expertise range from the neural circuitry that gives us the sense of smell (Jason Castro) to how neurons speed around our bodies  telling us what to do (Martin Kruse). All of which makes the lab quite nervous in a different sense of the word.

“We used to all be isolated in our labs” back in his former digs in Carnegie Science Hall, said Bavis. “This is a more collaborative environment.”

Larissa Williams

Title: Associate Professor of Biology
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2012
Date Photographed: October 20, 2021
She says: “Literally, this is science. I have no idea how any of this is going to turn out.”

Last fall, Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams taught a course that was introductory in name only.

Her course, Biology 195K, represents a new type of intro science course at �ֲ���ý. It delivers a cure. Or, more correctly, a CURE, in the form of a “Course-Based Research Experience.”

Increasingly popular in STEM curriculum nationally, CURE courses have recently been introduced into the �ֲ���ý biology curriculum by Williams, who is department chair, and her colleagues. CURE courses introduce research experiences earlier than ever in a student’s college career — not to accelerate the process, but to improve how students learn science, even at the introductory level: by doing real, hands-on research.

The name of Williams’ course ends with the letter K because there’s an alphabet soup of Bio 195 variations, 195A through 195K. Each one takes on a different research project covering various topics: marine biology, forest life, host-parasite evolution, and the fluid dynamics of sponges.

Williams’ students did investigations on how poison exposure affects animals. As she said midway through the semester, “Literally, this is science. I have no idea how any of this is going to turn out.” 

Williams taught two sections of the course, on Wednesday and Friday afternoons, in the biochemistry teaching lab on the third floor of Bonney Science Center. During one session, on Oct. 20, she led her students, mostly first-years, through the process of designing primers.

“Primers are used to ‘copy’ nucleic acid in the cell,” explained Williams. “We were doing so in order to understand how lead exposure impacts developing animals” at the molecular level. 

A bit later in the class session, she explained the cycles involved in copying nucleic acid in cells, “in particular how heat can break hydrogen bonds between nucleic acids, a key step in the copying process.”

�ֲ���ý professors are teachers and scholars. When it comes to the former, Williams is an award-winner. The latter sees Williams conduct research on how toxicants affect the development of aquatic species, such as zebrafish, a powerful model organism in biological research.

The spaces in Bonney Science Center blur those two identities, a good thing, says Williams, who is now better able to “combine my research interests in developmental toxicology in a lab setting with students,” Williams says. 

The teaching lab is near her research lab, which is close to the equipment room, all of which “makes asking cutting edge questions possible even at the first-year level.”

Here’s the fifth installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Donna Gendron, a Facility Services custodian who enjoys being part of a clean team.
• Martin Kruse, an assistant professor of biology and neuroscience who signals his approval of Bonney’s classrooms and labs.
• Alyson Farrington, an assistant in instruction in chemistry and biochemistry who hopes to instill a love — or at least a like — of chemistry.

Donna Gendron

Title: Custodian with Facility Services
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2013
Date Photographed: Feb. 4, 2022
She says: “If anyone needs help, all we do is text each other, and we go right down and help each other.”

There’s satisfaction in creating a clean space, says Donna Gendron, one of three custodians who work in Bonney Science Center. But what if you can’t see what’s clean?

Before moving to Bonney, Gendron worked in Dana Chemistry Hall, and by the time Dana emptied out in summer 2021, the building was well worn. “You’d clean something, and you couldn’t tell you cleaned it,” she says. (Dana is now undergoing a full renovation, including a complete change of purpose, from chemistry to introductory science teaching.)

“It was hard for me to keep up, to try and make it look nice, because everything was just so old. I did the best I could, plus it was just me over there. Over here, it’s a bigger building, but I get help,” she says, mentioning her custodial colleagues David Hanscom and Paul Butler. “As long as you keep up with it, everything stays nice.”

Gendron has worked in custodial services her whole career. “I’ve done cleaning all my life.” Past jobs have been at hotels and the bygone naval base in Brunswick. �ֲ���ý suits her just fine. “I like it better, to be honest with you. Hotel work was a lot harder, making beds everyday.” And sailors, she says, alluding to her work at the naval base, aren’t the tidiest.

She’s been working at �ֲ���ý for 10 years, and she plans to work at �ֲ���ý until retiring. “It goes by fast,” she says. 

Gendron, Hanscom, and Butler team up on occasion for difficult tasks or just troubleshooting. 

Hanscom, who works mostly on the first floor, brings the industrial scrubber and vacuum to the other floors to help out. “I say, ‘If you wanna do it, that’s fine,’” says Gendron.

“And Paul’s on the third floor, and we all get along well, and we try to be team players; if anyone needs help, all we do is text each other, and we go right down and help each other.”

Of the various rooms and spaces in Bonney — labs, study rooms, classrooms, hallways, and offices — “the classrooms are busy and a little more challenging to do, especially in the winter time, because there’s so much sand. But it’s okay; there’s three of us here, so it gets done. And the building’s new, which makes it easier to clean.”

Unlike the bunker vibe in Dana Chemistry, Bonney’s interior is bright and open with lots of glass, which can be a pain to keep clean. Some folks said to Gendron, “Oh, all that glass….” “But I like it,” she says, the way it allows folks to see and feel the rattle and hum of all that teaching and research inside labs and classrooms. 

Plus, Bonney’s residents aren’t likely to smudge the glass with noses and hands against the glass the way dogs and little kids do, she says. 

The big kids in Bonney — the students — she likes quite a bit. “They’re good kids — very clean over here. If we need to go into a room, and there are a couple of kids in there, they’re like, ‘No, no, come on in,’ they don’t mind.”

Martin Kruse

Title: Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2017
Date Photographed: Feb. 4, 2022
He says: “We’re not separated any more. That means more communication and collaboration.”

Among other topics, Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Martin Kruse teaches neurobiology, a field that explores how neurons transmit signals throughout our bodies, telling us to smile, jog, or pet the dog.

During a class session in February, Kruse took time to explain to his students the various factors that affect “signal propagation” in the nervous system. 

Signal propagation describes how a signal, such as a radio wave, gets to its destination. (Fun fact: In theory, an FM radio signal from the 1980s carrying a song like Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” has now propagated way past the constellation Ursa Major.)

In neurobiology, signal propagation “basically refers to how fast our brains operate and why,” said Kruse.

Kruse appreciates how the classroom’s setup — whiteboards, extensive projection equipment, and rollable chairs and tables — lets him pursue active-learning strategies, even ones as simple as taking a seat at a table. 

A few minutes after explaining the factors involved in signal propagation, Kruse did just that, joining a tabletop discussion with Annie Li ’24 of Oslo, Norway, Chloe Huh ’23 of Highwood, Ill., and Will Brown ’23 of Newton Center, Mass. 

Kruse listened to their responses to this prompt: “What would be important properties of nerve cells to communicate in a fast and reliable way?”

Among other research interests, Kruse’s lab in Bonney Science Center looks at how phosphoinositides regulate nerve cell activity, and in 2019 he received a grant of $270,000 to study these tiny but powerful lipids. The grant was through a network of 13 Maine educational and research institutions known as INBRE.

Imagine you’re a Michelin chef, but your kitchen is suddenly spread out over two floors. Your cooking area is on one floor, and your prep station on another. Meanwhile, the service area is way down the hall. That’s about how it was for many faculty who worked in Carnegie Science Hall.

In Bonney, Kruse and others have a great kitchen: lab space, a cell culture room, and electrophysiology suite close by. “We can do experiments that weren’t possible in our old lab space,” he said.

To keep the culinary comparison going, Bonney’s layout creates better communication among all the chefs de cuisine and their chefs — that is, professors and their research students. “We’re not separated any more. That means more communication and collaboration.”

Alyson Farrington

Title: Assistant in Instruction, Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2008
Date Photographed: Feb. 8, 2022
She says: “Even if they don’t all become scientists, I hope they come out of chemistry actually enjoying it.”

Over the winter semester, Alyson Farrington taught seven lab sections for the popular introductory course “Chemistry Reactivity,” each section comprising about 20 students.

At �ֲ���ý, Farrington is one of several assistants in instruction, known as AIs. Depending on the department and the need, AIs are academic linchpins, whether providing teaching assistance, technology support, or, in the natural sciences, guiding lab sessions and making sure all the lab equipment is up to snuff. 

When it comes to her labs, Farrington finds that a bit of laughter creates good chemistry. She keeps the mood light. After one session, she and George Hawkins ’24 of Jacksonville, Fla., found humor in, well, she doesn’t quite recall — which doesn’t matter, really. “George is a funny person,” she says.

During the lab, she moved from group to group. She stopped by to help Buey Grossman ’25 of Ketchum, Idaho, and Aldair Desiderio ‘24 of Trenton, N.J. They had a question. Farrington replied with a question. “I like to ‘answer’ a question with a question to help the students think through a problem themselves,” she says. 

In the intro course, Farrington works with students with an interest — and non-interest — in chemistry. She enjoys the challenge of teaching students who are “maybe a little hesitant or they’re immediately like, ‘Chem’s not my thing, but I sort of have to take this class.’”

Of course, she hopes they all continue on in chemistry. But even if they don’t all become scientists, I hope they learn something and that they come out of chemistry actually enjoying it.”

When that happens? “It’s my favorite thing.”

Bonney also features a plethora of “peekaboo” windows and glass doors, allowing any passerby to catch a glance of the people and workings in labs, classrooms, and study rooms. For students, “it’s probably pretty neat to see their peers in a lab and actually see them working,” says Farrington.

In the fall, Farrington will move back to Dana Chemistry Hall, now undergoing a year-long renovation to focus on science teaching, with a goal of effectively welcoming new students to STEM fields. 

Looking ahead, Farrington says the new and much-more-flexible teaching and lab spaces in Dana will allow faculty and staff to “shake up” the structure of introductory labs to include more individualized and projects-based labs. While teaching specific lab skills is critical, it’s also valuable “within those parameters” to give students the opportunity “to make their own decisions, especially as they advance,” she says.

The innovations that Bonney has allowed faculty and staff to usher in keeps Farrington fascinated with her work in the sciences. “It’s always evolving. There’s something fun and interesting and new happening all the time, whether it’s guest speakers, or somebody’s research is going well.”

It’s exhilarating, too, she says, to be surrounded by discovery, the feeling that “when you develop it, then it’s happening.”

Here’s the fourth installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Paul Butler, a Facility Services custodian, whose job is to see more than what most of us see.
• Sonya Locke, the building’s science resource manager, whose job runs hot and cold.
• Michael Sommer, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, who revels in the flexible teaching space of a Bonney classroom.

Paul Butler

Title: Custodian with Facility Services
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2018
Date Photographed: Feb. 10, 2022
He says: “We tend to see things that others normally wouldn’t.”

The piece of cleaning equipment that Paul Butler was maneuvering around a Bonney Science Center lab on Feb. 10 is officially called the “Tomcat Sport V2.0 Premium Walk-Behind Scrubber.”

In simpler terms, it’s a lean, mean, cleaning machine.

Butler is one of three custodians who work in Bonney Science Center, where he and the Tomcat do regular deep cleans of the floors. Here, he’s tending to the floor in a research lab.

Work is work, but truth be told, using the Tomcat is kinda rewarding, says his colleague David Hascom. “It does all the work, like a snowblower. You just walk behind it.”

Butler says that �ֲ���ý didn’t skimp when it came to outfitting the custodial staff with the tools they need to keep Bonney clean — one Tomcat runs about $7,600.

“The college equipped us with really good, top of the line equipment,” Butler says, which makes it easier to do what he does — “make the building shine. The students and professors as well as other staff who work here have a right to be proud of the building we all call home.”

Where most people would see a floor, David and his co-workers see the tiles. Where most people see a nice shine, David and his co-workers spot the scratch or scuff. “Our workload consists of way more detailed work than most realize. So we tend to see things that others normally wouldn’t.”

The improvement that Bonney delivers to the work of faculty and staff can be measured in time saved and tasks easier to do. “We’re able to wash three to four times more supplies than compared to washing them by hand in Carnegie Science Hall,” Butler says.

Literally, it’s no sweat to work in a building with ample space for storage and a finely tuned HVAC system. “We were so cramped” in the old vivarium, which was the home of zebrafish on the fifth floor of Carnegie. (Zebrafish are a powerful model organism in biological research.) “It was very warm in the summer months. The fish were happy, but we were extremely warm.” 

Sonya Locke

Title: Science Resource Manager
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2002
Date Photographed: Feb. 2, 2022, and Feb. 23, 2022
She says: “I think about the parallels that can be drawn to the workings of our lives.””

Sonya Locke’s job as science resource manager runs hot and cold.

On the hot side of Locke’s job is overseeing the sterilization of lab equipment. Most labs sterilize by “autoclaving,” which means using pressurized steam. Bonney’s sterilizer is in a second-floor room along with a commercial dishwasher.

The unit is the Amsco 250LS sterilizer, specifically designed for life-science labs (you can pick one up for about the price of a new Ford F-150 truck.) It generates steam heat up to 285 degrees Fahrenheit.

One of Locke’s daily duties is to clean the unit’s circular drain strainer. It’s small, just an inch and a half tall and just a half-inch in diameter, but vital. Like the strainers on your washing machine, if it’s clogged, nothing gets cleaned. “The sterilizer would not function,” Locke says.

Although her office is now in Bonney, Locke still works with colleagues in Carnegie Science Hall and spends time in those spaces. (Some biology faculty have retained offices and lab spaces in Carnegie.) Which led to the cold part of Locke’s job, when she spent time at her office computer reviewing photographs of materials in the cold room, located in Carnegie, which serves the natural sciences.

Like a walk-in refrigerator, a cold room is used to store large amounts of perishable materials used in research, such as samples of lake water, and used for procedures that need to be carried out in the cold.

Rather than standing in a cold room examining what’s there, Locke takes a smart approach, snapping photos that she examines back in the comfort of her Bonney office. Here, Locke has identified some containers with old contents that need to be disposed.

Tending to small things — like that strainer — to keep bigger things running smoothly is a metaphor, says Locke. “I think about the parallels that can be drawn from this act to the day-to-day routines and workings of our lives.”

Michael Sommer

Title: Visiting Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2019
Date Photographed: Feb. 2, 2022
He says: “A student can see what’s projected no matter which way they face.”

Bonney is fully equipped to support faculty and students as they collaborate to investigate and untangle scientific mysteries. And it’s set up for the newbies, too.

Michael Sommer, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, taught a section of Chemistry 108 over the winter. With labs and lectures, the course is as core a course can get: It looks at fundamental concepts underlying the structure and behavior of matter.

During a class session in a first-floor classroom on Feb. 2, Matthew Kijowski ’25 of New York City approached his professor, laptop in hand, to ask a question. “He was asking about a particular lecture slide that was pertinent to the problems we were working on in class.”

When Sommer taught Chem 108 last year, the lab and lectures were in Dana Chemistry Hall, whose teaching spaces were designed during the sage-on-a-stage era of the 1960s, when tiered seating and tiny arm desks, all facing forward, were the norm.

Indeed, the session that Sommer was leading in Bonney in February was a lecture in name only. He moved freely about, checking in with students working together at tables whose placement around the room is delightfully random. (All the tables and chairs have casters, so they’re easily moved.)

In a course about chemistry fundamentals, Sommer was teaching the fundamentals of thinking like a chemist. A few minutes before helping Kijowski, he stopped by a desk to help another first-year student, Molly Kelley of South Orange, N.J. 

“I was explaining the problem-solving strategy necessary for the types of questions we were working on,” he explains. “There are several steps needed to set up the solution, and I was describing the logical flow of these steps.”

The open floor plan is “the best part of the room,” he says. “The tables make it easier for students to work together. The expanse of table space created “plenty of room for papers, books, and laptops.” In turn, that means that “more students bring their laptops to class in this room than they used to in Dana. That gives them easy access to the lecture slides I post, which is very handy when they are doing worksheets because they can refer back to the notes easily.”

Classroom technology is always cool. But even better is classroom technology that gets used, like the multiple display screens. “It’s nice that you can display different things on each of the six computer screens.” And if Sommer puts the same visual on each screen, that’s great, too. “A student can see what’s projected no matter which way they face.”

Here’s the third installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Geneva Laurita, an assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry who takes advantage of all that whiteboard space;
• Jonathan Witt, a stockroom manager and safety technician, who is the college’s official “chemical hygiene officer;” and
• Lorna Clark, an assistant in instruction, who works closely with students and the laboratory equipment she trains them to use.

Geneva Laurita

Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2017
Date Photographed: Oct. 12, 2021
She says: “The new layout and upgraded spaces are allowing my lab to branch out into new directions that were previously limited.”

Touch your hand to almost any wall in one of Bonney’s hallways, classrooms, offices or lab, and you’ll mostly be touching whiteboard or pinboard.

Sure, there’s traditional sheetrock, but the amount of wall space devoted supporting communication feels distinctive, and totally in keeping with the mission of the building to elevate the capacity of �ֲ���ý folks to exchange ideas, create knowledge, and foster community. 

Early one afternoon last October, during a class session for the course “Advanced Topics in Inorganic Chemistry,” Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita used the expanse of whiteboard and a projector during one lesson.

A solid-state chemist, Laurita’s research concentrates on materials with energy and electronic applications. Considering her new lab in Bonney, she says that “the layout and improved space are allowing my lab to branch out into new directions that were previously limited.

Her lab explores, as she once said, “what the structure of a material is, how atoms interact with one another, and how does that give rise to physical properties — for example, how does it conduct electricity or interact with light?”

Which brings us to ion conductors, the topic of Laurita’s October lesson. While maintaining their solid state, ion conductors have near-magical properties: allowing ions — atoms or molecules that have an electric charge due to the loss or gain of one or more electrons — to move through them. This flow-through capacity is the basis for how a lithium-ion battery works, among other applications.

During this lesson, Laurita and her students made observations on materials and consulted the scientific literature to develop a set of principles that could be used to design high-performing ion conductors for battery applications.

“For this class in particular, we took advantage of the 360-degree whiteboards to compile all their findings,” she says. “From that, we were easily able to use the collective knowledge of the class to come up with our ‘guiding principles’ for new battery materials.”

The other day, we saw three students working together in one of the otherwise empty classrooms. The whiteboards are sure convenient when it comes to studying, one said. “When you fill up one section, you just move to the next.”

Jonathan Witt

Title: Stockroom Manager and Safety Technician
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2019
Date Photographed: Nov. 4, 2021, and Feb. 8, 2022
He says: “If we have it, don’t order it.”

“Chemists used to die young,” says Jonathan Witt, noting the goal of one half of his job title, safety technician for the natural sciences at �ֲ���ý, including the work done by chemists, biochemists, biologists, and neuroscientists in Bonney Science Center.

We were talking about how, in the late 19th and early 20th century, chemists had a cavalier attitude toward the dangerous chemicals in their labs, touching, smelling, and tasting them. And they smoked in their labs. All of which led to early, and sometimes explosive, deaths for more than a few.

Today, Witt and others at �ֲ���ý follow a range of laws by and other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, to keep �ֲ���ý science labs safe. In OSHA terms, Witt is the college’s “chemical hygiene officer.” In other words, he says dryly, “I do a bunch of safety stuff with chemicals.”

The other half of Witt’s job is stockroom manager, overseeing the science center’s storage of various chemicals — H₂NC₆H₄CO₂H anyone? — and lab equipment, from pipettes and petri dishes to test tubes and beakers and other glassware. (That chemical is aminobenzoic acid, an organic compound.)

In Bonney, Witt showed us how flammable chemicals have their own room that is its own “control area” with fire-rated walls and floors. Special lockers keep dangerous and “nasty” acids locked away. All the other chemicals are stored in their own room.

The equipment stockroom has storage space in the center, seven shelving units — the space-saving, sliding kind like in a library — and shelves, cabinets, and drawers along the room’s periphery. There’s a lot there. But there used to be more. Way more.

�ֲ���ý’ first dedicated space for science was John Bertram Hall and then, in succession, Hedge Hall, Carnegie Science Hall, and Dana Chemistry Hall. Over the years, Dana became like grandma’s old house, filled with an accumulation of equipment and chemicals. Witt and others are pretty convinced that some items simply got moved from space to space over the last century and a half. 

And when faculty members left the college, materials specific to their work often were left behind “and just sort of became part of the collection” in Dana, Witt says. “But often what they were doing was very esoteric or unique to them.”

After a years-long inventory of Dana’s contents, �ֲ���ý executed a plan for the safe disposition of all the unneeded supplies and equipment. Lesson learned, says Witt: No more pack rats. “Our approach now is to get rid of things that aren’t needed.” 

And going forward, when it comes to purchasing equipment or chemicals, “if we have it, don’t order it. Try to make sure that we’re not ordering excessive amounts of things. Because all that means is we eventually might have to pay for that to get decommissioned.”

Lorna Clark

Title: Assistant in Instruction
Joined �ֲ���ý: 1991
Date Photographed: Nov. 4, 2021
She says: “Being close by is a big part of the job”

As an assistant in instruction in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Lorna Clark spends much of her days in Bonney Science Center close to students and the scientific equipment that she trains them to use.

“Being close by is a big part of the job,” she says.

One morning in early November, Clark had an attentive group of 19 orgo students getting ready for the experiment of the day, a continuation of a lesson on how to isolate and purify clove oil.

As Clark’s students prepared for their experiment, the lab’s teaching assistant, Casey Winter ’23 of Malvern, Pa., checked with Clark about the air-flow monitor on the exhaust hood. “If the monitor reads zero” — meaning there’s no flow of air to remove fumes — “there’s a problem,” said Clark.

During the experiment, the students used separatory funnels. This piece of lab glassware, which looks like an upside down teardrop, is used to separate “immiscible” liquids, like oil and water. On this day they were working to purify eugenol, which had been separated from caryophyllene and humulene. “All three of these compounds are found in clove oil,” Clark explains.

Clark’s primary job is to get students ready and then instruct them during the department’s organic chemistry lab sessions. Clark has been at �ֲ���ý for 31 years, but the cohort she works with stays the same. “It’s still such a great age. I love working with these students.”

Clark also maintains some of the major instrumentation in the department, such as the NMR spectrometers. In Bonney, the NMR is conveniently more close to the organic teaching lab. When the labs were back in Dana Chemistry Hall, the NMR was “one floor down behind a locked door. Students submitted samples to a rack and a TA ran them.”

Which meant that the NMR was “a black box to the students. Now, “students can submit their own sample directly to the NMR autosampler.”

Another nifty new feature in Bonney’s organic chemistry lab space are desktop computers, allowing the students to keep electronic notebooks to submit to Clark after a lab, rather than hand-written ones. 

But old-school notebooks are still in play in various research labs, as is the value of learning to imagine and hand-draw the invisible molecular, atomic, and subatomic particles that students learn all about.

“There’s a lot to be said for learning to draw in organic chemistry, like learning how to draw compounds,” Clark says. “If you just cut and paste it, you don’t learn it!”

Here’s the second installment of our series that profiles, in images and words, each and every resident of �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building, Bonney Science Center, as they begin to engage with their wondrous new home and the students they work with. This week’s profiles feature:

• Amy McDonough, an assistant in instruction whose work includes helping students with stains and flames;
• Alexis Hockaday, an academic administrative assistant who was setting up one of the pivotal academic experiences of a �ֲ���ý senior; and
• Matthew Côté, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry who explains the Raman effect (which has nothing to do with overcooked noodles).

Amy McDonough

Title: Assistant in Instruction for Biology, Chemistry, and Biochemistry.
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2013
Date Photographed: Feb. 3, 2022
She says:  “What makes the work fun is helping students think like a scientist — and then you see the light bulb go on.”

Amy McDonough is one of �ֲ���ý’ assistants in instruction. These AIs, as they’re known, are linchpins of the lab who help set up and teach lab sessions with faculty and work closely with students to teach them the various lab skills needed in biology, chemistry, and biochemistry.

In these two photographs, McDonough, who is one of three AIs who work in Bonney Science Center, is working with the 17 students in a microbiology course taught by Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks. 

“It’s a busy class,” McDonough says with a note of understatement.

Among the skills that McDonough teaches is Gram staining, named for Danish bacteriologist Hans Christian Gram, who developed the technique in 1884. 

Learning to apply a stain to a specimen “is a key skill,” explains McDonough. Staining identifies which of two major groups of bacteria, which are based on certain observable traits known as phenotypes, in this case the different thickness of their cell walls.

Once a student learns to Gram stain a bacteria, and it’s time to categorize them, they then bring out what McDonough calls “the workhorse” of a microbiology lab, the compound microscope, developed more than 400 years ago. 

During the lab session, McDonough helped Allison Greuel ’23 of Freeport, Maine, adjust her microscope to examine a slide with Gram-stained specimens that she prepared. 

Depending on the color of the stained bacteria, Greuel can identify a specimen as Gram positive, types of which can cause diphtheria or toxic-shock syndrome, or Gram negative, often associated with food poisoning.

Another microbiology lab technique that McDonough teaches is “flaming a loop,” a so-called aseptic technique that prevents contamination of pure laboratory samples. “Microbiologists must learn it in order to handle bacteria safely and not cause contamination in the lab,” says McDonough.

Flaming a loop is done when a scientist takes a sample of live bacteria from a bottle or tube and transfers it to a petri dish using a thin wire with a tiny loop at the end that serves as the specimen-collection surface. During the transfer the wire and rim of the bottle or tube are both “flamed” with a Bunsen burner to sterilize them and ensure bacteria don’t escape.

In the pre-Bonney days, McDonough had to split time between Dana Chemistry Hall and Carnegie Science Hall, the two science buildings that housed the programs in biology, chemistry, and biochemistry that she supports.

A single home base has “helped me to be more productive and more easily available to the faculty and students whom I support,” she says. 

“What makes the work fun,” she says, are “those moments when a student may be struggling with a concept and you work with them, making them think — like a scientist — and then you see the light bulb go on.”

The student who arrives at the beginning of a semester isn’t the one at the end. “They’ve grown and gained confidence,” says McDonough, who came to �ֲ���ý with extensive research experience in the private biotech sector.

Like others in Bonney, McDonough was invited to speak with Payette, the project architect, about the ideal design of various spaces. In her case, she contributed ideas “to help design the preparatory lab in which I work as well as have some input on the teaching lab spaces in which I would typically work. And she’s more than pleased with the result. “They are all fabulous spaces in which to work and teach.”

Alexis Hockaday

Title: Academic Administrative Assistant, Bonney Science Center
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2021
Date Photographed: Feb. 2, 2022
She says: There’s a lot of activity packed into the �ֲ���ý job title “Academic Administrative Assistant.”

There are nine AAAs at �ֲ���ý, and they work with people and programs in all of �ֲ���ý’ academic buildings, from Olin Arts Center to the north, to new Bonney Science Center to the south. 

A trusted academic resource, they do everything from managing daily office operations (printers always need paper), assisting faculty with coursework preparations, and helping with position searches.

In Bonney, Alexis Hockaday supports departments and programs in biology, neuroscience, and chemistry and biochemistry. On a recent mid-week afternoon, Hockaday was working to organize one of the key experiences for a senior chemistry major: their honors thesis defense, which these days are often Zoom affairs, gathering �ֲ���ý professors and an outside examiner for an intense discussion of the senior’s work.

Behind Hockaday was a reminder of the changing seasons. When a mid-winter photograph was taken, the view outside her window onto Nichols Street was dominated by snowbanks. Two months later, the view was of bare ground (if still brown), and a couple bags of potting soil were on the sill, along with gardening gloves.

Hockaday says that while she’s not an avid gardener, “one of the AAAs had a bunch of cuttings she was offering up. So I have a few of those that I planted, and I just need pots for the others.”

Hockaday says she likes her daily rituals, even simple ones like being mindfully aware, as she moves about the building, of the natural light afforded by Bonney’s big windows. 

Or drinking tea. In the morning, it’s a robust Earl Grey; in the afternoon, green tea with jasmine. That cup of Earl Grey used to be a quiet pre-work moment at home. At least for the time being, with a 16-month-old child at home now, “those rituals are kind of out the window,” she says with a smile.

Matthew Côté

Title: Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 1991
Date Photographed: Oct. 26, 2021
He says: “I spend a surprising amount of time with some form of dictionary and English usage books, both dead-tree and electronic.” 

As the school year got going last fall, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Matthew Côté scheduled weekly meetings with two seniors doing year-long theses in his lab, Chris Dye of Windham, Maine, and Seren Parikh of Bedford, Mass. Both seniors will head to Ph.D. programs this fall, Parikh to Michigan, Dye to Notre Dame.

Continuing through the school year, the weekly meetings provide one-on-one opportunities for the seniors “to learn the unfamiliar parts of the science underlying their thesis projects.” 

The science is dependent on highly sophisticated instrumentation, but the meetings rely on something sleek but distinctly less complex: the white boards in Côté’s office. They’re one of his favorite aspects of the Bonney Science Center. “A key part of all my teaching,” he says. 

Côté’s lab uses sophisticated instrumentation to look at the electronic structure of solids and the interaction of light and matter. In recent years, he and his students, including Dye and Parikh, have added powerful new capabilities to the lab’s existing microscopy and spectroscopy instrumentation.

On one October afternoon last year, Côté turned to the white boards to describe the mechanism, known as the Raman effect, that underlies a new capability of the lab’s instrumentation. (Hampering his white-boarding was recent hand surgery, hence the bandage. “Not ideal for a right-hander but what are you going to do?” he shrugged.)

The Raman effect explains how particles of light “gain or lose energy as they scatter off a ‘sample of interest,’” Côté says.

“Just as a perfectly elastic rubber ball would bounce off a wall with the same amount of energy it arrived with, most light particles (photons) bounce off samples with the same amount of energy they arrived with,” Côté explains. “That process is called ‘elastic photon scattering.’”

But a tiny fraction of the photons that bounce off of matter, “on the order of one in a million, scatter inelastically, meaning they gain or lose some energy in the scattering process.”

By measuring the amount of energy these photons gain or lose, “we learn a great deal about the material that did the scattering. That’s Raman spectroscopy.”

And if the instrumentation is capable of “systematically making hundreds or thousands of Raman measurements within a tiny region of a sample, we can create an image that reveals how the material properties vary from location to location. That’s Raman microscopy.”

While Côté’s research lab is still in Carnegie, his office and teaching spaces are in Bonney. In his office, the books on his shelf are even more low-tech than the whiteboard but equally useful, and which titles get the most use depends on what he’s teaching. But, he finds, “I spend a surprising amount of time with some form of dictionary and English usage books, both dead-tree and electronic.” 

He turns to those sources because he often writes and designs supporting documents for his upper-level courses “rather than having students purchase (ridiculously expensive) textbooks whose scopes don’t really match my intentions for the courses. That means I do a lot of writing and I create a lot of graphics.”

Since 2018, when the Bonney Science Center project was publicly announced, we’ve mostly talked about the center in the future tense.

What it will look like. What we hope will happen within its brick and glass walls when �ֲ���ý professors, as both researchers and as teachers, take their ideas — and their students — across traditional disciplines of chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and neuroscience.

Well, now it gets real.

Since the building opened for the fall semester, Director of Photography and Video Phyllis Graber Jensen has made multiple visits to Bonney to engage with the building’s new residents as they, in turn, begin to engage with their new home.

“The architect has commissioned stunning photographs of what the building looks like,” Graber Jensen said. “I wanted to complement that, and portray in a candid way what life looks like for those who work in Bonney, day in and day out.”

Windows, lab benches, and chairs. Doors, stairs, and desks. Classroom multimedia, automated lighting, expansive views of campus — it’s all now in the hands of the �ֲ���ý faculty and staff who work in Bonney, each of whom we will profile in images and words in the coming weeks.

Here are our first three: Colleen O’Loughlin, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry; David Hanscom, building custodian, and Mary Hughes, who oversees the vivarium.

Colleen O’Loughlin

Title: Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2018
Date Photographed: June 24, 2021
She says: “My office is here and everything for research is here — it’s awesome.”

For Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Colleen O’Loughlin and fellow faculty and staff who moved into Bonney Science Center last summer, the relatively quiet weeks of a �ֲ���ý summer offered get-to-know-you time in �ֲ���ý’ newest academic building.

For example, on the morning of June 24, O’Loughlin took time to explain to her student researchers some of the improved features of her laboratory space, including the fume hood.

“I explained to them that the hood that is big enough to hold all the solutions we need to stain and visualize biofilms,” she says.

In the life of bacteria, biofilms are helpful, serving as a kind of “apartment building, a structure that protect bacteria from external stresses, like antibiotics or the immune system, the same way that apartment buildings or houses protect us from the elements and weather outside,” O’Loughlin explains.

Continuing the metaphor, O’Loughlin and her student researchers are seeking ways to “alter the design of these apartment buildings, to see if we can design antibiotic drugs that might be able to get inside those apartment buildings” and help remove the bacteria.

“I’m in the building that I teach classes in. My office is here and everything for research is here — and it’s awesome.”

The fume hoods are important because the bright purple dye that researchers use to stain biofilms “requires a lot of fixing and rinsing and drying — honestly, it’s a bit like developing film,” says O’Loughlin. “The hoods in Bonney are much larger than the hood I had in Dana, and it makes this process a lot easier.”

The improved hood is just one example of how Bonney is giving faculty and students more of what no one has enough of: time.

“I used to have to go back and forth between Carnegie and Dana, and it was very difficult to fit in experiments between classes. Now I am in the building I teach classes in, my office is here, everything for research is here — and it’s awesome.”

Like many others who moved into Bonney Science Center last summer Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Colleen O’Loughlin has been struck, both literally and figuratively, by how much more natural light cascades into the building.

As she posed for a photograph in her office on one of the longest days of the year, June 24, she was thinking how she’d be able to “put many more plants in here over the years” than she could in her old digs in Dana Chemistry Hall.

David Hanscom

Title: Custodian with Facility Services
Joined �ֲ���ý: 2020
Dates Photographed: Feb. 2 and Feb. 23, 2022
He says: “Just trying to keep up with it.”

Frequent freeze-thaw cycles this past winter left a stubborn layer of ice on campus walkways. That meant lots of sand had to be put down for safety — and that spelled more work for campus custodial staff, including Dave Hanscom.

“A lot of foot traffic brings in a lot of sand,” says Hanscom as he wields his trusty Windsor Sensor XP12 commercial vacuum cleaner. “In the winter, the bag will fill up in just two days.”

He was working in one of the first-floor Bonney classrooms when the photo was taken. He was thinking, “I’m just trying to keep up with it.” Hanscom has a wry sense of humor. “I guess the only way to stop the sand is to cancel classes,” he says with a smile.

The last time �ֲ���ý created an entirely new science building, Dana Chemistry Hall in 1965, the primary surfaces were hard and hardy: brick, concrete, plastic, and linoleum.

In Bonney Science Center, Hanscom has a few more surfaces to tend to, including natural wood, which he cleans with Murphy’s multi-wood cleaning spray, which has 99% naturally derived ingredients and is 100% biodegradable. Then there are the carpets and fabric-covered chairs. Stains in those come out with Delta Ultra cleaner and degreaser.

“Seeing the students working in the labs. That’s cool.”

(In recent years, the college has reduced the number of everyday cleaning products menu from 15 to four, all of which meet the EPA’s Design for Environment Standard for Safer Cleaning Products.)

In this photo, he’s using Murphy’s to wipe down one of the large study tables in the main lounge area. “I’m thinking of my next task in that room — it’s a pretty big area,” he says. 

An intentional design feature is lots of glass, from the huge curtain walls that look out onto campus to the many interior glass walls that give good glimpses of what’s going on in the labs. All that glass “looks more intimidating to clean than it is,” he says. Still, “I’m always looking for smudges.”

Perhaps the most fun piece of custodial equipment is the Tomcat Sport V2.0 walk-behind floor scrubber. “It’s like using a snowblower,” Hanscom says. “It does all the work.”

Hanscom came to �ֲ���ý after working for 18 years at a nearby assisted living center. Going from a quieter, elderly community to a more youthful one took some adjustment. But now, that’s the best part of the work: “Seeing the students working in the labs. That’s cool.”

Mary Hughes

Title: Vivarium Coordinator

Joined �ֲ���ý: 2001

Dates Photographed: Feb. 8, 2022

She says: “You’re going to be bad before you’re good.”

Mary Hughes watches intently as Emily Walsh ’24 of Sausalito, Calif., learns how to count “rotifers” under a microscope. 

Rotifers are tiny microscopic invertebrates that, among other attributes, are food for the larval zebrafish that Hughes and her student workers grow in the vivarium. 

A powerful model organism in biological research, zebrafish have helped scientists ; better understand ; and, in a �ֲ���ý lab, research how toxicants affect the development of aquatic species.

In the vivarium, rotifers are cultured in buckets filled with salt water and a rich amount of nutritious algae, then fed to the larval zebrafish. While it’s easy to measure a cup of chow for a dog, it’s hard to measure out the correct number of rotifers at mealtime. (And like any creature, larval zebrafish must be fed a specific amount of rotifers.) 

Walsh was learning how to take a small sample from the total serving of rotifers, place it under a microscope, and count the rotifers with a clicker.

From that count, a mathematical formula is used to extrapolate the total number of rotifers in the serving. From there, adjustments can be made to the serving’s “food density” before the rotifers become the fish larvae’s next meal. 

One of Hughes’ new student workers, Walsh is just learning this complex process. As with learning any skill, getting good at rotifer counting is “about repetition,” says Hughes. And like any good teacher, she doesn’t expect her student workers to be adept right off the bat. “You’re going to be bad before you’re good,” she says. 

Students have to learn how to manipulate a special counting slide, called Sedgewick-Rafter cell, which is not easy. At first, “you’re going to set it up wrong. You’re going to put the slide on wrong. You put the cover slip on wrong. It just takes practice.”

“I love to see them gain the confidence they need, and tell me, ‘I got this!’”

And while there’s only one way to execute the task, Hughes sees many reactions from students.

“Everyone’s different. Failing bothers some more than others — they want to get it right the first time. But I always warn them: ‘You’re not gonna get this the first time. And it’s okay if you break a slide If you don’t get the count correct the first time, it’s okay. It’s like algebra: you’re not gonna get it right the first time.”

And working with students and teaching them a skill? “The best part of my job,” she says. “I love to see them gain the confidence they need, and tell me, ‘I got this!’”