The goals of a construction project tend to be functional.

They’re often aesthetic, too — sometimes with poorer outcomes, but often with happy ones when, like �ֲ���ý, you plan and invest your resources thoughtfully.

Of course, construction projects create changes in myriad dimensions beyond those two. And Campus Construction Update is interested in all the ways a construction project may participate in its surroundings. But one that we find especially intriguing is also, because it’s so subjective, one of the least practical and most difficult to address: the effects on remembrance and sense of place.

The object of a yearlong major renovation, Dana Chemistry Hall is shown from Alumni Walk on a brilliant late-September morning. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

A view toward Hedge Hall from the Dana attic. Staging is in place for utility rough-ins. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Note the trenches for subfloor utilities in this former mechanical space on the first floor of Dana Chemistry Hall. This area will eventually be divided between a kitchenette/office and mechanical space. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Formerly a secure area for storing chemicals, this room will become a student lounge and tutoring area. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This second-story space in Dana will become an active-learning classroom, one of three on that floor. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

These hangers in the Dana Hall basement will support new overhead pipes, ducts, conduits, etc. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Formerly a lab, this expanse on Dana’s second floor will be divided between two large, light-filled classrooms. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Consigli Construction’s corporate values are reflected in signage at the gate to the Dana Chemistry Hall work site. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

The coarsely textured material is fireproofing newly sprayed onto floor structure in Dana Chemistry Hall. The existing electrical equipment has plenty of life left in it and won’t be replaced during the current (pardon the pun) renovation. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Holes where a restroom used to be in Dana Chemistry Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Think of the built environments that appear in your dreams. Or of the buildings you pass by daily and don’t notice, versus the ones that are long gone but unforgettable. We aren’t philosophers (in case you hadn’t noticed), but it’s hard not to wonder at a weird similarity between solid structures and memories — both can seem so real and inhabitable, and yet are ultimately so ephemeral.

A similar topic came up the other day as we chatted with Chris Streifel, a project manager for �ֲ���ý Facility Services, about one of his top priorities, the renovation of Dana Chemistry Hall.

Prep for the renovation included a years-long inventory of the building’s contents and a plan for the disposition of all the supplies and equipment — for instance, what would go to the new Bonney Science Center versus what would go into an appropriate waste stream for no-longer-needed chemicals. (Or into Campus Construction Update’s basement for our TikTok Frankenstein tribute.)

Much of the inventory took place in Dana’s so-called attic, where stuff was stashed in storage areas amidst the air-handling machinery that dominated the fourth-floor space. Now that attic has been transformed — emptied and stripped down to bare wood, then lined with new insulation and wallboard, and now awaiting utility hookups and a new generation of HVAC equipment.

“It’s just a remarkable change from two years ago,” said Streifel. “There’s a few of us who get that feeling walking through there,” a certain resonance of the old amidst the new — “having worked through all of that stuff that had been stored for decades, stuff that was stored short-term, stuff that should’ve never been stored up there, and all of the old equipment and everything else.

“Watching those things progressively vanish was interesting. To see the progress there now is really kind of a strange thing. Every now and then you see a little vestige of what used to be mixed up with a hint of what’s yet to come.”

Until the archaeologists declare otherwise, though, the reinvention of Dana will take no breaks for history or remembrance. Indeed, technicians for various subcontractors are already in the attic roughing in MEP connections — mechanical, electrical, plumbing. Soon a self-leveling cementitious compound will be applied to pave the way, so to speak, for future flooring, and the crew from Roland’s Drywall will be erecting partition walls.

And Streifel expects the installation of that new HVAC gear to begin by mid-October.

One level down, Dana’s third floor is sealed in plastic while folks from Abatement Professionals of Westbrook, Maine, remove hazardous materials. That should be done by the second week of October, and will conclude abatement work for this project.

Meanwhile, progress on the first and second floors is showing how functional, aesthetic, and pedagogical goals for the Dana makeover will play out. Demolition is at, or past, the stage of tearing down walls, and the slow pivot from destruction to construction is beginning. Streifel said that the two floors are about on a par in terms of progress, but appearances are deceptive, just because there has been more to do on the bottom floor.

A major issue is that the first floor, entered from the outside from Alumni Walk, is actually the building’s ground floor (there is also a small basement beneath that). On the upper stories, pipes that need to run below floor level, such as drainage for wastewater or used chemicals, can be hung from the ceiling of the level below. But on the first floor, those pipes must be laid in trenches cut into the concrete floor slab and the soil beneath it.

All those trenches made a dramatic impression during our visit on Sept. 27, but they’ll soon be filled in.

Another first-floor wrinkle involves Room 119. A former lecture hall, 119 previously had tiered seating, but that feature has been rendered obsolete by the advent of the hands-on, student-centered pedagogical approach called active learning, and consequently by less “sage on the stage” style lecturing. So that floor couldn’t be trenched until after it was flattened. (At least, for once, it was a floor that was leveled, and not a playing field.)

With fewer walls still standing and none of those distracting trenches running all over the place, the second floor provides a clearer sense of the improved flow and transparency that’s central to the Dana renovation. For instance, back in the day, anyone using the main entrance from the Historic Quad was greeted by walls and restrooms. This was handy if you needed a restroom or, in the case of the walls, something to bang your head against. But otherwise it gave a poor impression.

In the new Dana, when you enter that front door, what greets you will be a nice welcoming hunk of space —the new, more commodious core of Dana. To your left and right you’ll see entrances into generously fenestrated, 48-seat active learning classrooms, with a smaller one to the rear. Restrooms throughout the building, meanwhile, will be relocated off to the side, closer to the elevator. (And there will be twice as many of them, they’ll have better soundproofing than before, and they will be ADA compliant.)

On both levels, Streifel explained, once the space is cleared out and cleaned up, that same kind of flooring compound will be poured. That’s likely to happen in the next week or two. And then wall construction will start.

Overall, Streifel is pleased by Dana’s progress since July, especially “given the uncertainties of a renovation project of this magnitude. And particularly this phase of it, the demolition phase,” he said.

“There are a lot of unknowns as you start digging into walls and taking things down in a building from this era. Obviously, we have concerns from a hazardous material standpoint and that’s gone very smoothly.

“We’re almost exactly where we wanted to be from a schedule perspective. A few little hiccups here and there, but we’ve been able to roll with what we found. So, largely everything’s going really well. And I think that the team is strong and got us off to a good start.”

He added, “we’re in that blissful kind of stage where things are, A, fortunately going pretty well; and B, it’s pretty simple work right now. We only have two or three contractors heavily onsite as opposed to the 10 or 15 that’ll be there in another few months. It’ll get a little more complicated then.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update loves to hear from you. Please send your questions, comments, and dream narratives about current, past, and future construction at �ֲ���ý College to dhubley@bates.edu, with “Campus Construction” or “Who’s playing Igor in that TikTok?” in the subject line.

Andrew Kennedy, Gabrielle Chua ’18, and �ֲ���ý students

Molecule created by �ֲ���ý students could lead to more effective treatment for cancer and Alzheimer’s patients — Multiple outlets

A variety of news organizations reported the invention at �ֲ���ý of Bobcat339, a molecule created by students that could have implications for research and treatment of cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew Kennedy and seven students co-authored a paper describing the molecule, which inhibits the ability of a certain enzyme to regulate genes. This class of so-called TET inhibitors could one day limit the aggressiveness of cancers.

With their professor, Andrew Kennedy (right), three of the seven student coauthors of the scholarly article describing Bobcat339 posed last May in a Dana Chemistry lab: from left, Michael Bennett, Haoyu Sun, and Nathanael Kuzio, all ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Gabrielle Chua ’18 was the student who ultimately structured the molecule.

“It’s big for the field of epigenetics, it’s big for cancer research, and it’s big for the field of memory,” Kennedy told local NBC affiliate WCSH-TV, whose segment on the molecule was shared on Facebook by “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.”

Read the stories:��

• “,” WCSH-TV, Oct. 25, 2019��
• “,” Maine Public, Oct. 30, 2019

Holly Ewing

�ֲ���ý snags federal cash to help study Lake Auburn — Sun Journal

Steve Collins of the Sun Journal reported that the college will receive $842,000 of a $6 million National Science Foundation grant to figure out how to track and predict cyanobacterial blooms in lakes.

Holly Ewing, professor of environmental studies and the Christian A. Johnson Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, is key to the investigation, which is led by Alberto Quattrini Li of Dartmouth College.

Often important sources of drinking water, U.S. lakes are experiencing increases in cyanobacterial blooms, says Holly Ewing. The NSF project will allow better water-quality monitoring than ever before.

The multi-institution, multidisciplinary team will use boats and aerial drones to collect a wide variety of data on several lakes, including Lake Auburn. The project requires understanding communities’ relationships with their lakes, Ewing said.

“Understanding people’s values with respect to how we pay attention to lakes, how we interact with lakes — there’s definitely a cultural and place-based component to that,” she said. “And all of this is intimately related to the science.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, Oct. 25, 2019

Ryan Smith

Auburn’s Ryan Smith wins marathon, qualifies for U.S. Olympic Trials — Sun Journal

�ֲ���ý staff member Ryan Smith talked to the Lewiston Sun Journal’s Adam Robinson about his victory in the Hartford Marathon in October, which qualifies him for the U.S. Olympic Team marathon trials.

Smith, manager of purchasing, accounting, and licensing for �ֲ���ý Information and Library Services, ran the marathon in 2 hours and 18 minutes.

He’s now headed to Atlanta for the Feb. 29 trials, where he hopes to break the top 50 (the top three in each gender make the Olympic team).

“I’m certainly excited to see the full-time professionals, as always,” Smith said. “In terms of nerves, I think the pressure of trying to qualify is much more nerve-wracking than actually competing there. I’m just going to try and beat as many people as possible.

“That sounds more fun than nerve-wracking, especially because it’s a hilly course and I’m really good on hills.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Sun Journal, Oct. 18, 2019

Nolwazi Nosisa Ngwenyama ’16

UCT’s 2020 Mandela Rhodes scholars — University of Cape Town News

The University of Cape Town announced that Nolwazi Nosisa Ngwenyama ’16, a �ֲ���ý graduate and graduate student in gender studies, has won a prestigious Mandela-Rhodes scholarship.

Nolwazi Ngwenyama ’16 listens to a speaker at the Office of Intercultural Education at �ֲ���ý in 2014. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The scholarships are awarded to African citizens with “exceptional leadership capacity” and provide funding for postgraduate study in South Africa.

Ngwenyama triple-majored in politics, anthropology, and women and gender studies at �ֲ���ý. A native of Eswatini, she volunteers with the United World Colleges Eswatini National Committee.

Read the story:��

• “,” University of Cape Town News, Nov. 7, 2019

Rebecca Herzig

For Millennial women, body hair presents a complicated choice — HuffPost

In the HuffPost, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies Rebecca Herzig helped guest writer Sofia Barrett-Ibarria round out her argument that while choosing not to remove body hair might be a “feminist” choice, body hair is more complicated than a “to shave or not to shave” binary.

In 2014, Rebecca Herzig heads to the lectern to deliver a talk. (Sarah Crosby/�ֲ���ý College)

Herzig is the author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal. In the HuffPost, she pointed out that while there is some mainstream acceptance of body hair on women, the stigma around body hair can have real, negative consequences, especially for women who are not “able-bodied, white, young, thin and toned, expensively dressed, etc. — in every other way,” she told Barrett-Ibarria.

Read the story:��

• “,” HuffPost, Nov. 5, 2019��

Peter Weyand ’83

Inside the six-figure project to solve the mystery of NBA flopping — The Guardian

It’s a phenomenon that baffles and frustrates basketball fans: flopping. And from a science perspective, Peter Weyand ’83, a professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at Southern Methodist University, knows more about it than almost anyone, writes The Guardian’s Patrick Hruby.

Funded by Houston Rockets owner Mark Cuban, Weyand and his team set out in 2014 to measure how much force it takes to knock someone over and what it looks like when a basketball player is genuinely set off balance, vs. embellishing a light hit or straight-up faking a foul — that is, flopping. They ran tests using first a dummy, then real people wearing heavy padding.

Turns out, it doesn’t take much force to knock someone over. “In many cases, if the defender just doesn’t move their feet, then down they go,” Weyand said. “I’ve been through thousands of charge-block collisions, and never realized how easy it was.”

A rather obvious indication of a flop, the SMU team found, is when players stick their arms straight up as they go down — that doesn’t happen naturally.

Read the story:��

• “,” The Guardian, Oct. 30, 2019

Renee Leduc ’98

Will 5G Affect Weather Forecasts? — BBC Click

The program quotes Renee Leduc ’98 on how a recent Federal Communications Commission action could harm meteorologists’ ability to forecast the weather, including dangerous hurricanes.

The issue has to do with an FCC decision to auction off specific wireless radio frequencies to commercial wireless providers for next-generation 5G networks.

The scientific community, including Leduc, opposes the move. They say that giving these frequencies to 5G networks will interfere with unique measurements from weather satellites that are very important to weather forecasting models, the two most well-known being the American model (GFS) and the European model (the ECMWF). The FCC says the interference is not a threat.

Renee Leduc is quoted in this BBC Click story about how turning over specific radio frequencies to wireless providers could harm weather forecasting.

Founder and principal of the consulting firm Narayan Strategy, Leduc is a member of the American Meteorological Society’s Board on Enterprise Economic Development and its International Affairs and Radio Frequency Allocation committees.

She told The Washington Post that it’s “crucial” that the question of interference is “decided in a way that is informed by atmospheric science since the measurements are so crucial to sound weather predictions.”

The issue is front and center at the World Radiocommunications Conference, which ends Nov. 22 and where “for the past month they have been working to coordinate the deployment of 5G technologies across the world,” Leduc tells �ֲ���ýNews.

Read the stories:

• “,” The Washington Post, March 8, 2019
• “” Nature, Nov. 22, 2019

Carrie Jones ’93

The unstoppable Carrie Jones; New thriller ‘In the Woods’ released — Mount Desert Islander

Down East arts journalist Nan Lincoln spoke with author Carrie Jones ’93 about her new young-adult thriller, In the Woods.

The novel, co-written with Steven E. Wedel, follows a teenage girl as she investigates possibly paranormal events. The two writers’ conversation, however, ventured into Jones’ other projects, from the children’s book festival she helped organize to her prolific books and blogs.

“I have to write — all the time,” Jones said. “If I don’t get my ideas onto the page they pile up. But I love seeing where my characters will take me. It’s always a new adventure.”

Read the story:��

• “,” Mount Desert Islander, Oct. 27, 2019��

Matt Moretti ’06

Pioneering mussel farmer buys rival, plans expansion — Portland Press Herald

The Portland Press Herald reported that Bangs Island Mussels, a Portland, Maine-based producer of rope-grown mussels, bought local competitor Calendar Island Mussel Co.

Bangs Island Mussels is owned by Matt Moretti ’06.

In 2016, Matt Moretti ’06 feeds mussels into a machine that works to break apart tissue connecting many of the clusters. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

The company produces mussels by growing them on ropes suspended from rafts, selling the product to Portland restaurants as well as wholesalers. The key to sustainable mussel farming, Moretti told PPH reporter Peter McGuire, is scale, and with the new acquisition Bangs Island Mussels can double its production and workforce.

“The economics of it are such that the faster you can add on volume to your production, the sooner your costs drop and profits go up,” he said.

Read the story:��

• “,” Portland Press Herald, Nov. 18, 2019����

Elizabeth Strout ’77

Oprah reveals Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout as new book club pick — CBS This Morning

With bestselling author Elizabeth Strout ’77 sitting next to her, Oprah Winfrey announced on CBS This Morning that Strout’s new novel, Olive, Again, is her new book club selection.

Olive, Again is the sequel to Strout’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Olive Kitteridge.

Winfrey said she admires Strout’s ability to take “the simplest of things and turn them into something that feels real to us.”

Oprah Winfrey talks with Elizabeth Strout ’77 on CBS This Morning.

Melissa Wong ’01

Women Of The C-Suite: “Fear is a liar; fear will tell you the craziest things” with Melissa Wong, CEO of Retail Zipline — Authority Magazine

Carly Martinetti of Authority Magazine, a publication on the platform Medium, interviewed Melissa Wong ’01, co-founder of Retail Zipline.

Building a company, Wong said, requires fearlessness — even when you think you should be afraid.

“Fear is a liar,” she said. “Fear will tell you the craziest things. When I first started, I legitimately feared our company would fail. … When you’re in the moment, don’t let feelings of fear lead your actions or choices.”

Working in communications for Old Navy showed Wong how hard it is for large retail brands to get their own stores to implement ideas. So she and a co-founder started Retail Zipline, which streamlines that kind of communication.

Read the story:��

• “,” Authority Magazine, Nov. 3, 2019��

In the early 1990s, �ֲ���ý professor Thomas Wenzel began to think that the traditional approach to teaching chemistry — lectures and what he calls “recipe-based” laboratory assignments — was missing something.

For instance, students that Wenzel expected to thrive in his courses scored poorly on exams. Yet, in contrast, the students he hired to perform hands-on research in his �ֲ���ý lab were highly engaged with the material.

“It seemed that the learning that happened in the research work was so much deeper and so much longer-lasting,” Wenzel says. “I realized I needed to make my instructional laboratories more research-like in their approach.”

So in his courses, Wenzel started putting students in groups to puzzle through questions and calculations. He framed his lab assignments as solving problems instead of following recipes. His students engaged more robustly with the material, and exam scores went up.

Dana Professor of Chemistry Tom Wenzel, who will retire in 2020, has been honored with the establishment of a student research fund in his name and an achievement award from the American Chemical Society. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Those simple steps began a pedagogical evolution that has made Wenzel, now the college’s Dana Professor of Chemistry, a national leader in the teaching of chemistry — including pioneering work to create open-access course materials — as well as a model for involving students in research and a prolific researcher.

And at the start of his last year of teaching before retirement from �ֲ���ý in 2020, Wenzel received two major honors that recognize his contributions to his field and to the lives of his students.

“It’s hard to imagine a more gratifying way to end my career.”

In August, the American Chemical Society awarded him its 2019 George C. Pimentel Award for “outstanding contributions to chemical education.”

Soon thereafter, one of Wenzel’s former students paid tribute to his mentor by establishing the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research, to support students conducting summer research on campus.

“It’s hard to imagine a more gratifying way to end my career,” Wenzel says of the two career honors.

+A Few Wenzel Awards

Rachel Austin, who taught at �ֲ���ý from 1995 to 2015, saw firsthand how Wenzel transformed chemistry education.

“Tom has expanded the notion of ‘learning through doing’ to the teaching of chemistry at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum,” says Austin, who is the Diana T. and P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry at Barnard College and who nominated Wenzel for the Pimentel award.

She adds, “He was well ahead of the wide-scale recognition of the value of inquiry-based learning” in chemistry.

In this summer 2005 image of Tom Wenzel’s typically active research lab, Wenzel (left) and post-graduate research fellow Catherine Dignam (second from left) work with student researchers: from left, Matt Chodomel ’06, Shawna-Kaye Lester ’08, and Monique Brown ’07. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Complementing Wenzel’s accomplishments in chemistry education are his research achievements. He has published extensively on chirality, a molecular phenomenon that parallels “handedness” in humans.

He develops techniques to identify molecules that are mirror images of each other but can have different reactive effects — for example, one form of the drug thalidomide reduces morning sickness, but its mirror image was responsible for birth defects in the 1950s and 60s.

Along the way, Wenzel has become a pioneer in bringing undergraduates into his research lab. Some 128 students — 80 of them women — have worked in his lab since he joined the �ֲ���ý faculty. Throughout his career, Austin says, Wenzel has been “an active proponent for the involvement of women and minorities in science.”

“One of my approaches was to start hiring first-year students out of my general chemistry core course into my research laboratory,” he says, “as a way to provide them a more realistic experience of what it meant to actually do chemistry.”

In addition to his publications on pedagogy, Wenzel has published some 40 articles on undergraduate research, been involved with the national Council on Undergraduate Research, and, in 2010, won the American Chemical Society Research at an Undergraduate Institution Award.

A nationally recognized advocate for undergraduate research, Tom Wenzel (third from right) poses with some of his students in 2015 at the International Chirality Conference. Wenzel chaired the 2015 event, the premier conference in his research field, and �ֲ���ý was the only undergrad school represented. Back row, from left, William Patton ’15, Mira Carey-Hatch ’14, Yolanda Rodriguez ’15, Tom Wenzel, Alison Dowey ’15. Front row, from left, Tayla Duarte ’17, Cira Mollings Puentes ’16, Caroline Holme ’16, Brielle Dalvano ’16, and Anna Berenson ’16.

Of Wenzel’s 96 published research articles, 67 have had �ֲ���ý student co-authors. One of those authors was Jim Weissman ’84, who says he always wanted to study chemistry, but his sophomore classes were a “rocky road.”

Wenzel both encouraged Weissman to stick with the major and helped him as he caught up with course work. Then he hired Weissman to work in his lab.

Wenzel “touched the lives of a lot of chemistry majors.”

For his senior thesis, Weissman studied methods for detecting pharmaceuticals and pollutants and, along with Wenzel and three fellow students, co-authored an article, “Lanthanide ions as luminescent chromophores for liquid chromatographic detection.”

Wenzel “had a unique style, and he touched the lives of a lot of chemistry majors,” Weissman says. “Had he not been at �ֲ���ý, those opportunities that I had would not have been realized.”

That influence is sharply evident in the paper that Weissman coauthored. His fellow authors, Elsie DiBella ’85, Maureen J. Joseph ’83, and Joshua R. Schultz ’83, all earned doctoral degrees. They’ve all forged careers in biotech, as has Weissman, who is now chief operating officer at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals.

Early in this semester, Weissman and his wife, Kyoko Oba Weissman, donated $100,000 to �ֲ���ý to establish the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research, which provides scholarships for students to conduct summer chemistry or biochemistry research on campus.

Tom Wenzel (center) is flanked by donors Jim Weissman ’84 and Kyoko Weissman as they celebrate the establishment in September of the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research. Joining them in Dana Chemistry Hall are, from left, Jake O’Hara ’21, Nick Jones ’20, Shanzeh Rauf ’21, Maddie Murphy ’20, Associate Professor of Chemistry Matt Côté, and Owen Bailey ’22. ��(Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In September, Wenzel and the Weissmans, who were on campus bringing their son back to �ֲ���ý for his sophomore year, hand-delivered a $100,000 check to fund the endowment and gathered with chemistry students to celebrate the fund’s establishment.

“If I could only highlight one thing about my whole career, it would be engaging undergraduates in meaningful research,” Wenzel says.

“That a former student of mine gave money to the college to provide summer support for future undergraduates — forever — I truly don’t think there could be any more meaningful honor to me than that.”

Thomas Wenzel and Jim Weissman ’84 reconnect in a laboratory in Dana Chemistry Hall in September. Weissman, a chemistry major who was mentored by Wenzel and is now chief operating officer at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, established with his wife an endowed fund in Wenzel’s name. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Invented by �ֲ���ý students in their professor’s lab, a molecule with a �ֲ���ý-inspired nickname carries enough pharmaceutical promise that �ֲ���ý has filed a provisional patent application for the molecule.

Synthesized in 2017 in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew Kennedy, the molecule Bobcat339 has the potential to govern the function of genes related to memory loss and genes that aid and abet the spread of cancer.

A provisional patent application protects the college’s intellectual property for a year until a formal patent application is completed.

All told, seven �ֲ���ý students broadly contributed to research leading to the creation of Bobcat339; for their contributions, the seven are co-authors of the ” which��outlines the synthesis and promise of Bobcat339.

With their professor, Andrew Kennedy (right), three of the seven student coauthors of the scholarly article describing Bobcat339 posed last May in Dana Chemistry lab: from left, Michael Bennett ’19, Haoyu Sun ’19, and Nathanael Kuzio ’19. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The student coauthors are Emma Jarczyk ’17, Joseph Alp ’18, Gabriella Chua ’18, Kelly Wassarman ’18, Haoyu Sun ’19, Nathanael Kuzio ’19, and Michael Bennett ’19. Kennedy is a coauthor, too, as is Assistant Professor of Biology and Neuroscience Martin Kruse, who contributed a cell culture experiment.

The Kennedy lab works in epigenetics, a field that looks at how genes can change their function without being altered themselves. Kennedy’s ongoing work includes important achievements in potential therapies for the autism-spectrum disorder called Pitt Hopkins Syndrome.

About that Bobcat name

Giving a novel compound like Bobcat339 a simple nickname is useful, says Kennedy. And that’s a vast understatement, since the molecule’s full name is: 1-([1,1′-Biphenyl]-3-yl)-4-amino-5-chloropyrimidin-2(1H)-one.

While “Bobcat” places the creation at �ֲ���ý, the numerals “339” also tell a story. The first “3” identifies Haoyu Sun, the third of four students (thus far) who have synthesized molecules for testing in the Kennedy lab. (Nos. 1, 2, and 4 are Jarzyk, Wassarman, and Kuzio.)

The last two numbers, 39, indicate the specific page of Sun’s well-worn lab notebook, where you can find the description of Bobcat339’s creation — its recipe, if you will — which took place on May 31, 2017. (Each page of each student’s notebook, front and back, describes the synthesis of one molecule that the lab will test, totaling upward of 50 molecules.)

Last May, Haoyu Sun ’19, researcher No. 3 for Bobcat339, displays the pivotal page 39 of her notebook describing the synthesis of Bobcat339. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

The field of epigenetics tries to answer a question that confounded early cell biologists. If nearly every cell in our body contains our entire genome, how is it that some cells become the liver, and others become brain cells?

“How does this happen?” Kennedy asks, rhetorically. “It’s as if you handed the exact same blueprint to three different contractors, and they create three different homes.” At one level, “it just doesn’t make sense,” he says.

The answer, he explains, resembles how two libraries might arrange the same collection of books. The Neuron Library would place neuron-specific books up front for frequent use, and put books about liver cells into storage so they’re inaccessible until needed.

The Liver Library, however, would do it the other way around, putting the liver books up front for frequent access and storing the neuron books.

To extend the library metaphor, there’s a very powerful “librarian” at work: Known as DNA methylation, it’s a process that decides where and how genes are either read or put into storage, and thus what kind of cell the genome produces.

Presto! Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy draws the chemical structure of 1-([1,1′-Biphenyl]-3-yl)-4-amino-5-chloropyrimidin-2(1H)-one, aka Bobcat339:

Methylation refers to the placement of methyl groups, composed of parts of molecules made of a single carbon atom bonded to three hydrogen atoms, directly onto DNA. This placement “alters whether or not genes near that methyl mark are expressed or silenced,” Kennedy explains.

Enter Bobcat339, a molecule that throws a “wrench in the gears” by preventing a certain enzyme, known as TET1, from doing its usual job of removing a methyl from a gene.

This ability gives Bobcat339 promise in the world of drug discovery. “There’s great interest in creating TET inhibitors as an avenue to potentially dial back the aggressiveness of some cancers,” Kennedy explains

The lead author (and it’s not the professor)

For a lab like Kennedy’s, creating a novel compound is pretty straightforward, as it is for a chef creating a new soup.

A chemist can “quickly make a molecule that’s never existed on this planet — probably never existed in the universe,” Kennedy says. “The possibilities are infinite for molecular structure.”

Creating a new soup or molecule is easy; it’s far harder to create a dish that dazzles the palate — or a specific molecule to accomplish a specific epigenetic task, says Kennedy. “My students and I will go to the chalkboard and design dozens of ways to make a molecule. And we try to rationalize, based on what we know, the most likely route to success.”

It involves a lot of trial and error. Kennedy compares it to how a climber might imagine a new route to a peak. “You can see the peak. And you might imagine that the north face is the easiest way up. But then you start the climb and find an obstacle you couldn’t see from the ground. So you have to backtrack and try again.”

Enter one of Kennedy’s trailblazers: Gabriella Chua. She’s the lead author of the paper describing Bobcat339, not Kennedy. “It’s often the case in science,” explains Kennedy, “that the lead author knows more about the genesis and trajectory of the project, and this is very true in Gabby’s situation.”

Gabriella Chua ’18, the lead author of the paper describing the creation of Bobcat339, served as the eyes and ears for Kennedy’s lab during her senior year. (Theophil Syslo/�ֲ���ý College)

During her senior year, Chua served as the Kennedy lab’s eyes and ears as the team churned out and evaluated dozens of new molecules, including Bobcat339.

Chua was well-prepared for that leadership role thanks to earlier courses with Kennedy and other �ֲ���ý professors, including her junior-year advanced organic chemistry course, where Kennedy “pushed us to do our own, more independent problem solving and thinking,” she said.

“Grappling more with uncertainty than with certainty.”

Instead of just seeking answers to questions, as she had so far in her coursework, she was now being asked to frame original research questions.

That meant “grappling more with uncertainty than with certainty,” she says. “I became curious with the process of science, and how we’ve been able to make definitive conclusions about the things we consider ourselves to understand.”

Senior-year research in Kennedy’s lab was a “way to follow these curiosities in a productive way,” she says. Importantly, “he gave me the space and trust to do these things.”

Chua’s job was to evaluate the lab’s progress and develop new approaches, tracking “what was working and what wasn’t, trends that we wanted to aim for, or trends that I saw that weren’t working.”

After graduation, Chua spent a year doing research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. After considering offers from a variety of top doctoral programs, Chua has joined the Tri-Institutional Program in Chemical Biology, jointly sponsored by Weill Cornell Medical College, The Rockefeller University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

“Bobcat339 is the product of really hard work and great relationships, but there’s also a splash of good luck.”

For Chua, the name “Bobcat339” says something about the mindset needed to do research. “You can work as hard as you want, and things might still not turn out well. All the compounds that we tested could just as easily have not worked.”

When it does work out, as with Bobcat339, Chua says it’s good to be grateful — and a bit humble. “Bobcat339 is the product of really hard work and great relationships, but there’s also a splash of good luck.”

And, she adds, believing that there’s good luck out there, that maybe something can tip the scales in mysterious ways, “makes me excited and optimistic for the future.”

For Kennedy, the achievement of Bobcat339 speaks to his students’ rapid intellectual growth over their four years. “They go from receiving knowledge and memorizing information they need to know, to the mindset of, ‘how do we, as scientists, tackle a problem?’” he says.

“They make that transition very quickly. It’s like they become different people.”

U.S. Provisional Patent Application

“Cytosine-Based TET Enzyme Inhibitors” U.S. Provisional Pat. Ser. No. 62/822,774, filed 03/22/2019

PCT Application

“Cytosine-Based TET Enzyme Inhibitors” PCT Application Intl. App. No. PCT/US19-23760, filed on 03/22/2019

Funding

This work was supported in part by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103423, the Foundation for Pitt Hopkins Syndrome Therapeutics, the University of Pennsylvania’s Orphan Disease Center’s 2018 MDBR Pilot Grant Program, the Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and �ֲ���ý College.

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The malfunctioning of a single human gene causes an autism-spectrum disorder called Pitt Hopkins Syndrome.

The syndrome has profound impacts on intellectual development and cognition, mobility, breathing, digestion and other functions. Notably, it affects communication: Most people with Pitt Hopkins are unable to use language, even sign language.

In recent years, a handful of researchers have made great strides in understanding Pitt Hopkins. And one of them teaches at �ֲ���ý.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in August, is among the disorder’s first and leading researchers. And the work that he’s doing with his �ֲ���ý students may be bringing a therapeutic approach to Pitt Hopkins within reach.

Pitt Hopkins is extremely rare. Fewer than 600 cases have been diagnosed worldwide. Until this decade, Pitt Hopkins research was minimal, although its genetic connection was discovered in 2007.

Kennedy’s Pitt Hopkins research is a facet of his broader investigation into how cognition, specifically memory formation, is affected by so-called epigenetic factors — biochemical mechanisms that control how genes are organized.

“I don’t know what it’s like caring for someone with a developmental disability, but I imagine it requires hope,” he says. “Hope includes uncertainty, and it requires investigation and effort, probably setbacks and imperfect outcomes. But at the core there has to be hope.”

Kennedy’s research has attracted about $427,000 in grant support to �ֲ���ý in all. His broader investigation is being funded by a $339,300, three-year grant from the INBRE Investigator program, part of the award from the National Institutes of Health, administered by the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory.

That investigation is focusing on ways that, in non-diseased brains, a process called DNA methylation affects long-term memory formation.

In addition, �ֲ���ý has received $88,000 from the , a volunteer nonprofit established by families of children with the disorder, to support Kennedy’s Pitt Hopkins–specific research.

“Pitt Hopkins syndrome, although rare, is a ruinous disease,” says Matt Auer, vice president of academic affairs and dean of the �ֲ���ý faculty. “When Andrew applied for the �ֲ���ý chemistry appointment, his postdoctoral research on DNA methylation and its impact on long-term memory formation got the attention of my colleagues in chemistry and neuroscience.

“We were thrilled when Andrew accepted our offer to join �ֲ���ý. After just one semester, he is emerging as a key interdisciplinary bridge-builder in the sciences at the college.”

Founded in 2012, the Pitt-Hopkins Research Foundation essentially inaugurated Pitt Hopkins research when it reached out to J. David Sweatt, a neurobiologist then at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

“After just one semester, Andrew is emerging as a key interdisciplinary bridge-builder in the sciences at the college.”

The first molecular neurobiologist in the U.S. to investigate the disorder, Sweatt hired Kennedy as a postdoctoral research associate in 2012, and the pair went on to create the first mouse model of Pitt Hopkins — a fundamental advance, as it gave them and other scientists a basis for further study of the disorder.

With the team of Sweatt and Kennedy, “we got really, really lucky,” says Audrey Davidow Lapidus, foundation president. “It was like hitting the jackpot twice. The two of them really spearheaded some amazing research.” (Sweatt now chairs the pharmacology department at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.)

Lapidus and her husband, Eric Lapidus, are the parents of Calvin, who was diagnosed with Pitt Hopkins at 13 months and is now 5 years old. “He has profound developmental delays,” his mother says. “He still cannot walk. He likely will never talk. Some of the other kids with this disorder have severe seizures and breathing episodes, like apneas and hyperventilation.”

The failure of a single gene — TCF4 on chromosome 18 — is the root cause of Pitt-Hopkins, but that failure has a ripple effect. Because TCF4 produces a protein that helps other genes to be read, “it’s a compounding problem,” says Kennedy. “It’s not just one gene not working, it’s a whole family of genes that TCF4 controls not working correctly.”

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy in his lab in Carnegie Hall on Dec. 14, 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Sweatt and Kennedy capitalized on the fact that there are drugs that “affect gene expression in kind of a wholesale way, called epigenetic modifiers,” says Kennedy. He works specifically with a category of modifiers called histone deacetylase inhibitors, or HDAC inhibitors.

They correlated genes known to be affected by HDAC inhibitors with the genes involved with Pitt Hopkins. One drug in particular emerged from this detective work: Vorinostat, marketed as a cancer treatment under the brand name Zolinza.

“We treated the Pitt Hopkins mice with the drug, and it profoundly improved their capability of learning and remembering,” Kennedy says.

“And this went across every type of behavior that we looked at, whether it be maze-solving, object association, or even object location memory.”

It was an electrifying discovery — all the more so because Vorinostat has already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, albeit for a different use. “So there’s a possibility that we can now look at this in a clinically controlled trial setting,” hopefully within five years, says Kennedy.

“Single-gene disorders are a sort of Rosetta Stone for figuring out larger issues like autism, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia.”

At �ֲ���ý, Kennedy’s PHRF-funded work will pursue the Vorinostat angle from two directions. First, he and his students will continue to scrutinize specific genes affected by Vorinostat. Second, they will investigate the potential of other FDA-approved HDAC inhibitors for treating Pitt Hopkins.

“We’d like to pick one with the least number of side effects before going into a clinical trial,” because Vorinostat does have side effects, Kennedy says. “We want to know exactly which horse to put our money on before going to clinical trial.”

Moreover, the INBRE-funded study will have a bearing on the Pitt Hopkins work. HDAC inhibitors require ongoing use to be effective, but therapies that target DNA modification, specifically DNA methylation patterns, may have longer-lasting effects on cognition.

What are the students in Kennedy’s charge doing? “They’re going to be trying different therapies on mice, and then giving them tasks to learn and seeing if they do any better than control mice. This is all based on the hypothesis that the epigenome [the complex of chemical compounds that can control the genome] can be targeted to improve learning and memory.”

With a collection of model molecules in the foreground, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Kennedy is shown in his Dana Chemistry Hall office on Dec. 14, 2016. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

At the same time, genetic material from the treated mice will be sent away for sequencing. “We’ll be looking exactly at the changes in the genome that occur by going into the neurons and assessing what changed there.”

While the number of known Pitt Hopkins cases is only in the hundreds, the work being done by Kennedy and other scientists in the field reaches beyond that single disorder: a growing body of scientific evidence shows that single-gene disorders like Pitt Hopkins hold clues to understanding afflictions that are vastly more common.

“They hold so much promise for unlocking treatments for other cognitive disorders,” says Lapidus. “They are a sort of Rosetta Stone for figuring out larger issues like autism, Alzheimer’s, and schizophrenia.”

She points out that the initial PHRF grant to Sweatt’s lab at Alabama was followed in 2014 by a research grant of more than $1.8 million from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. “They recognize that this is really important, especially with regard to figuring out what we can do about autism.”

Researchers like Sweatt and Kennedy, she says, are “not just researching a rare disorder in some little bubble. This really does have larger ramifications.”

But it’s nevertheless true, as Kennedy points out, that researching an orphan disease “means there are fewer resources and less awareness. Tasks such as organizing a clinical trial, which require large numbers and control groups to be meaningful, can be daunting with such a small population.”

“It can also be hard on the parents that have to wait on the pace of scientific research,” he adds, “but it’s clear that the fact that research is occurring produces hope.”

Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry Tom Wenzel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

There’s a time to be passive and a time to be active.

When you’re hoping to learn something, passive is sitting in a classroom and (hopefully) soaking in the lecture.

And there’s active, where you’re taking a hands-on approach to solving problems that have their roots in real-world situations. Sometimes, especially in the sciences, that’s the best way to learn.

Tom Wenzel, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý, favors that second approach in his teaching. And the National Science Foundation agrees with him: The NSF recently awarded Wenzel and a collaborator at the University of Iowa $900,000 to further a practice called “active learning” at schools across the country.

In a 2013 file image, Tom Wenzel consults with Cira Mollings Puentes ’16 of Kingston, Jamaica (at left), and Mira Carey-Hatch ’14 of Laconia, N.H. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“This is a way to help faculty meaningfully change the way they teach,” Wenzel says. “To move away from lectures to doing in-class group work, and away from ‘recipe-driven’ laboratories to more open-ended experiments. And to move toward enabling students to design experiments, and figure out what the data means and whether it’s supporting their hypothesis.”

Provided through the NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, the grant supports Wenzel’s longtime leadership in creating an adaptable analytical chemistry curriculum that will enable instructors at all types of colleges and universities to implement active learning.

In this latest phase of the project, teachers of analytical chemistry from different institutions will take part in a series of workshops and follow-up activities designed to instill the methods and goals of active learning in the classroom and lab.

�ֲ���ý will receive some $632,000 over three years. It’s the third and final NSF grant for the project, which the foundation funded in 2008 and again in 2011 to support the development of online curriculum materials.

The balance from the latest award will go to Wenzel’s collaborator, Associate Professor Renee Cole of the University of Iowa, a specialist in chemistry education. Cole will assess how effectively workshop participants assimilated the active-learning approach, and how effective that approach was with teaching their students.

Wenzel is something of a pioneer in active learning, says Professor of Chemistry Paula Schlax, this year’s recipient of �ֲ���ý’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

“Tom teaches analytical chemistry using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual,” says Schlax.

“The approaches that he uses — active-learning exercises in the classroom, laboratory experiments that are inquiry-based and involve ‘real-world problems’ — are repeatedly reported to be among the best in helping students succeed in science courses and develop a sense of belonging in the community of scientists.”

“Tom teaches using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual.”

Wenzel describes this latest phase of the project as a pilot to test the efficacy of multiple active-learning training sessions for chemistry instructors. “For a lot of people, a half-day symposium doesn’t get them to say, ‘I’m going to totally change the way I teach,'” he notes.

Instead, the training will entail successive sessions — national workshops followed by regional events, in turn bolstered by follow-ups such as visits to participants’ home institutions.

“If, three years from now, we can provide data saying that what we’re doing works — people are actually changing the way they teach — that could set the rest of the group up to continue this project,” Wenzel says.

“It could serve as a model for other areas in chemistry, and maybe other STEM fields in general.” He adds that the project is also designed to increase diversity in chemical instruction and, by extension, other realms of math and science.

“We have now run two workshops for faculty at historically black or Hispanic-serving institutions,” Wenzel says. “We had 52 participants, and many of them have great stories about how they’ve incorporated more active learning in their classes and labs. Several have gotten grants funded for curriculum work that came out of our workshops.”

A member of �ֲ���ý’ chemistry faculty since 1981, Wenzel’s research involves sophisticated techniques for identifying enantiomers — molecules that are mirror images of each other but, despite that similarity, can have very different reactive effects.

Earlier this year, Wenzel received a new entry on his long list of professional honors and achievements as the American Chemical Society designated him an ACS Fellow — a designation recognizing contributions to both the society and the field of chemistry as a whole.

The designation came as Wenzel, appointed Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý in 1997, anticipates retirement within a few years.

The Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry, Tom Wenzel started at �ֲ���ý in 1981. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

An analytical chemist at �ֲ���ý since 1981, Tom Wenzel specializes in sophisticated techniques for identifying enantiomers — molecules that are mirror images of each other but, despite that similarity, can have very different reactive effects.

The fact that Wenzel is responsible for 86 publications related to his research (out of a total of 162), including two books, tells you something about his productivity.

And the fact that 61 of those publications were co-authored by �ֲ���ý students — 82 students, all told — tells you something about Wenzel’s belief in the value of undergraduate research.

Wenzel was recently honored for those contributions, among others, to the field of chemistry by the discipline’s foremost professional organization. The American Chemical Society designated Wenzel an ACS Fellow — an honor that takes the whole scope of his achievements into account.

The designation comes as Wenzel, appointed Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý in 1997, anticipates retirement within a few years. “This honor is largely a recognition of accomplishments over a long career — you know, you don’t get it just from one big moment,” he says.

“So it’s rewarding to have my profession say, ‘We appreciate the things you’ve done both for chemistry and the principal professional organization in chemistry.’ It’s really gratifying to know that the work I’ve done for so many years is recognized.”

“This honor is largely a recognition of accomplishments over a long career.”

The ACS designation is the latest in a long line of professional honors for Wenzel, not to mention grants for research and educational programming that total nearly $3 million.

“This honor highlights what we at �ֲ���ý have known all along — as a researcher, an advocate for his profession, and most of all as a teacher, Tom Wenzel is a powerhouse in the field of chemistry,” says �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer.

The ACS named 57 Fellows for 2016. Wenzel is one of only three in the group who represent small liberal arts colleges. The ACS bestows the Fellow designation on the basis of achievement in two areas: professional contributions to the field of chemistry itself, and volunteer service to the society.

Leading the list in the former category is his advocacy for undergraduate research. “For many students, participating in research can be the most profound educational experience they have in their four years at �ֲ���ý,” Wenzel says.

“One reason is that they often have far more independence in their research project than in coursework, and they have to put their knowledge and skills to use trying to complete their work. Because many experiments don’t work the first time through, the students are forced to use their knowledge to try other strategies.

“Trying to solve a problem that is original, where the answer isn’t known, where they are trying to create knowledge, is usually something new for them. I believe that for many, it takes learning to a new level.”

“Trying to solve a problem that is original, where the answer isn’t known, where they are trying to create knowledge, is usually something new for students.”

In 2010 the ACS gave Wenzel its Research at an Undergraduate Institution Award, lauding broadly recognized research that has contributed significantly to both chemistry and the professional development of undergraduate students.

In 2002, Wenzel was the first chemist to receive the Council on Undergraduate Research Fellows award, presented to CUR members who have developed nationally esteemed research programs involving undergrads.

And, over a 25-year-span, he has received seven National Science Foundation Research in Undergraduate Institutions grants supporting student participation in his research.

Wenzel’s contributions to his profession also include leadership in the effort to re-imagine how analytical chemistry is taught. He advocates for “active learning”: engaging students with specific, complex problems that reflect real-world situations, rather than marching them through a catalog of topics and recipe-style lab work with no context.

In this 2007 file image, Tom Wenzel is shown with student researchers in his Dana Chemistry lab. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In 2011, he led a group of faculty from 25 institutions that received $600,000 from the NSF to create an in-depth, online chemistry curriculum based on active learning. Aimed at undergraduates, the materials are adaptable for diverse students at a broad variety of institutions, from small liberal arts schools like �ֲ���ý to large public universities.

The curriculum work addresses another facet of Wenzel’s career: his commitment to diversifying the profession of chemistry, bringing in more women and people from other groups underrepresented in the field. “There’s a rather large body of literature that shows that an active-learning approach to teaching is useful at retaining members of historically underrepresented groups in the sciences,” he says.

In one of the most recent developments of his curriculum development work, Wenzel and his collaborators have presented two workshops for faculty at historically black or Hispanic-serving institutions.

“We’ve had 52 participants from those institutions, many of whom have given us great stories about how they’ve changed their teaching of classes and labs to incorporate more active learning,” Wenzel explains. “Several have gotten grants for curriculum work that came out of our workshops.”

An ACS member since 1978, Wenzel’s service to the organization is aligned with his professional interests. Among other activities, he has been a member of the ACS Committee on Professional Training since 2011, and is in the second of his three years as chair.

The committee operates a national certification program for chemistry programs at colleges and universities. Some 160 doctoral and more than 700 four-year programs in the U.S. have the certification, and more than a dozen apply for it annually.

Returning to the work he has done to advance his field, Wenzel points out that support from �ֲ���ý has been key to his success. “�ֲ���ý provides an environment that allows faculty members to meaningfully contribute to their profession,” he says.

“A lot of faculty who come here aspire to that.”

Caroline Holm ’17, Southern Maine Community College intern Alex Krech, and Anna Berenson ’16, work with the bacteria that causes Lyme disease in the lab of chemistry professor Paula Schlax this past August. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Lyme disease is just awful. In addition to being transmitted by disgusting blood sucking ticks, the disease��signals its arrival with spreading, bullseye rashes.

It often culminates in joint pain, headaches and other debilitating symptoms, and upwards of one person in five develops long-term symptoms, including chronic pain, vision problems and heart complications.

The three-year, $345,750 grant from the National Institutes of Health will also support research opportunities for �ֲ���ý students.

But from a scientific perspective, Lyme disease is fascinating, as �ֲ���ý chemistry professor Paula Schlax explains. The bacteria that causes it, Borrelia burgdorferi, is unlike any other organism she’s ever studied. “It has features and characteristics that are unlike most other bacteria,” Schlax says.

“It doesn’t require iron to live, and it may be the only organism for which that’s true,” she adds. “Most bacteria have circular chromosomes, a big loop of DNA, but this has DNA that’s linear. We have very little information about how genes get turned on and turned off in this organism.”

Paula Schlax is a professor of chemistry.

Schlax’s study of Borrelia, its genes and the “switches” that control them, has earned her a three-year, $345,750 grant from the National Institutes of Health — funding that will also support research opportunities for �ֲ���ý students.

The goal is to better understand how these switches work when the bacteria moves from a tick into a mammal, and from a mammal into a tick.

Although antibiotics often succeed in treating the disease, more than half of Maine’s counties are at high risk for Lyme disease, which is spread by deer ticks.

In Maine, 2014 was a record year for Lyme disease, with nearly 1,200 confirmed cases. The six New England states accounted for 35 percent of the nation’s confirmed cases of Lyme disease.

Every year, roughly 30,000 Americans are confirmed as having been��infected with the Borrelia bacteria. But because Lyme disease is often not reported or diagnosed, the actual number of infections��could be 10 times higher than that, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

“I had a couple friends in college whose mothers got Lyme disease and they both had very, very serious complications from it,” Schlax said. “So it’s always been in the back of my head that this can be really horrible for people.”

Schlax started working with Borrelia when she received funding through Maine INBRE (IDeA Network of Biomedical Research Excellence) in 2009. The Maine INBRE award allowed her to focus on understanding gene regulation in Borrelia.

The infection that causes Lyme disease is activated in the bacteria when it moves from tick to mammal. Understanding how those switches occur��— or better yet, figuring out how to stop or alter them��— could yield new treatments for Lyme disease, Schlax says.

“The more we understand that, the more likely it is that someone else can use that information when thinking about ways to alter that transmission to make [the bacteria] less effective,” she says.

Schlax’s research examines how the shape of an RNA molecule influences its ability to interact with other molecules in the bacterial cell. In her lab in Dana Chemistry Hall, she and her students will use the grant to monitor how fast Borrelia RNA gets broken down by enzymes called ribonucleases, important information to know when studying how to inhibit the bacteria.

“We’re interested in interactions that are responsible for enzymes that chew up the RNA into little nucleotide pieces,” Schlax says. “How does that work?”

“It’s always been in the back of my head that (Lyme disease)��can be really horrible for people.”

Using living cells, Schlax and her students add antibiotics to stop Borrelia from making new RNA. Then, at various intervals, they measure how much RNA has been broken down by the ribonucleases in host cells.

“Sometimes how tight [the proteins] bind is what matters, and other times it’s who binds first,” Schlax says. “I’m interested in switches that work by both of those mechanisms.”

The NIH grant will allow Schlax to hire a lab technician as well as fund paid summer research opportunities for as many as nine students over the life of the grant. In addition, three thesis students are currently working with Schlax on related research.

Students “will be measuring the protein levels, RNAs, they’ll be making synthetic pieces of RNA to see what the ideal piece of RNA to be cut is,” Schlax says. “They’ll be doing everything that’s in the grant. It’s truly collaborative with them.”

Schlax has taught at �ֲ���ý since 1998, and was promoted to full professor in August. She graduated from Clarkson University in 1989, and obtained a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1994.

Attending an international ocean science conference last month, Professor of Chemistry Rachel Narehood Austin emailed us to say she was “stunned” by what she was seeing.

No, the source of great wonder wasn’t her surroundings (the conference was held in Hawaii) but, as she wrote, “the impact that �ֲ���ý alumni are having at this meeting.”

Held at the end of February, the is the world’s largest gathering of ocean scientists, engineers, students, educators, policy makers and other stakeholders.

Against the backdrop of global climate change, the meeting is an especially critical venue for scientific exchange among the world’s leading scientific minds.

“Be fearless”

And what’s it take to be an ocean scientist? You have to be intrepid, says Austin.

In a �ֲ���ý context, “that means we teach our students to be fearless in using whatever scientific tools, from whatever scientific disciplines,” to solve real-world questions and problems, she says.

For example, Austin said, the alumni who presented at the Ocean Science Meeting either took �ֲ���ý science courses focusing on chemical reactivity in the environment (particularly the ocean), or they did extensive work in the college’s state-of-the-art Environmental Geochemistry Laboratory, a collaborative teaching and research facility in Carnegie Science Hall.

In the end, Austin says, alumni researchers in almost any discipline are “flourishing in a world that really blurs disciplinary boundaries every day, and we encourage them to do that.”

�ֲ���ý alumni at the meeting were:

• David Johnston ’02, a �ֲ���ý environmental studies major who is now an associate professor at Harvard in the Department of Earth and Planetary Science.
• Erin Bertrand ’05, a �ֲ���ý double major in environmental studies and chemistry who starts a tenure track position in biology at Dalhousie University in 2015.
• Kelton McMahon ’05, a �ֲ���ý biology major who is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
• Claire Parker ’11, a �ֲ���ý chemistry major who is a Ph.D. candidate at UCSC under the noted researcher Ken Bruland.

David Johnston ’02

At Harvard, looks at how biology shaped the world billions of years ago, before the rise of atmospheric oxygen.

David Johnston ’02 is an associate professor at Harvard, where his lab looks at how biology shaped the world billions of years ago, before the rise of atmospheric oxygen.

While his team can’t (yet) travel back in time to examine the Earth’s oxygen-free era, today’s ocean offers a “rich and wonderful” analogue of that ancient world.

Specifically, oceans have what are called “oxygen minimum zones,” certain depths at which oxygen saturation is very low.

By looking at these OMZs, Johnston’s team can test their ideas about ancient Earth and, at the same time, shed light on the behavior of these systems today.

“While many approaches to understanding OMZs rely on shipboard experiments or other indirect techniques, we have developed an in situ, or direct, way to estimate what’s happening in the OMZs.”

Using isotopes of oxygen and sulfur, they’re learning more about the nitrogen and sulfur cycles within OMZs. These cycles have a direct effect on various ecosystems.

At �ֲ���ý, says Johnston, a combination of “coursework and research experiences fostered a unique perspective on how to approach a scientific problem,” he says, “while also instilling the intellectual nimbleness that is required of interdisciplinary work. This combination has really paid dividends.”

(Johnston’s path through �ֲ���ý also included a nod to the social sciences. His senior thesis used the writings of the early 20th-century to analyze the question of reintroducing wolves to the Adirondack Park in New York state.)

Erin Bertrand ’05

co-chaired a session on vitamin micronutrients and their impact on marine microbes.

She also presented findings from an experiment conducted in Antarctica’s Ross Sea in 2013, in which researchers looked at how changes in water temperature, carbon dioxide and iron availability affect phytoplankton.

Kneeling on sea ice in the Ross Sea, Erin Bertrand ’05 prepares to take a 1,000-liter sample of seawater as part of a 2013 study of whether the phytoplankton and bacteria in the seawater are starved for iron. (Photo by Jeff McQuaid)

Phytoplankton carry out photosynthesis, and iron, as a trace element, is necessary for this process, explains Bertrand. “This experiment will help us predict how climate change is going to impact the amount of photosynthesis happening in the Southern Ocean,” she says.

“This is particularly important because the Southern Ocean plays a large role in determining the relationship between the world’s oceans and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations,” she adds. “Change in Antarctic phytoplankton growth in response to a warming ocean has the potential to profoundly influence that relationship.”

When she starts her position at Dalhousie, Bertrand will be nominated for a Canadian Research Chair, a $300 million Canadian program to attract and retain the world’s most accomplished and promising minds.

Kelton McMahon ’05

At the Ocean Sciences meeting, organized and co-chaired a major session on “compound-specific stable isotope analysis,” or CSIA.

In terms of understanding ecosystems, this powerful, relatively new tool can analyze an organism’s isotopic “fingerprint,” which in turn tells about its life and times, its place in the food web and where it’s been.

Kelton McMahon ’05 (left) dives among coral reefs in the Red Sea. McMahon earned a doctorate from the joint MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution program in oceanography. (Michael Berumen / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

McMahon’s research has looked at long-term isotope data from deep-sea corals in the North Pacific Ocean that have lived “an incredibly long time, over 2,000 years.”

He says that since the end of the Little Ice Age around 1850, there appears to have been a “fundamental shift” in the ecosystem’s biogeochemistry. Like so much of what affects the environment on a large scale, the reason for the shift might relate to something very small, in this case, microscopic organisms known as phytoplankton.

McMahon uses a computer-programmed micromilling instrument to drill samples from a deep-sea coral cross section. (Photograph courtesy Kelton McMahon).

In the North Pacific Ocean, McMahon and his coauthors have seen a “dynamic change” in the composition of the phytoplankton community, from one that was dominantly eukaryotic (cells have a nucleus) to one that is now prokaryotic (cells don’t have a nucleus).

“Our results provide an unprecedented historical context for the dramatic recent changes in Pacific Ocean biogeochemistry,” he says.

The findings, he adds, could also change how scientists think about the North Pacific subtropical “gyre,” or ocean current movement. Because these currents are a “critical regulator of global CO2 and biogeochemical balance,” any change in phytoplankton communities could alter that critical function.

Claire Parker ’11

Claire Parker ’11 is doing research that’s part of the Geotraces project, an international effort to measure the concentrations of trace metals in the world’s oceans.

gave what Austin called a “wonderful talk” on three metals — scandium, yttrium and lanthanum — and their distributions in the ocean. Her thesis adviser, Ken Bruland, is an expert in the interaction of trace metals with biotic (living) and abiotic (nonliving) aquatic ecosystems.

Parker’s work is part of the project, an international effort to measure the concentrations of trace metals throughout the world ocean in order to better understand key biological, chemical, and physical processes.

Parker enjoys her work because there’s no limit to where the study of trace metals might take her.

“Studying trace metals is surprisingly applicable to almost everything else in the ocean.”

For example, some metals are necessary nutrients for plants, and plants are at the base of the ocean food chain.

Some pollutants can be tracked with trace metals. And undersea hydrothermal vents release “huge concentrations of many metals in a plume that can be detected a thousand miles away.”

Leila Schneps.

�ֲ���ý presents lecturers offering insight into mathematics and medical technology on Feb. 26 and 28.

Leila Schneps, a mathematician specializing in number theory (and moonlighting as a murder-mystery author), gives two talks under the auspices of the Sampson Lecture Series on Feb. 26. At 4:30 p.m., she gives the technical talk Multiple Zeta Values: Crossroads of Number Theory, Geometry and Algebra in Room 104 of Hathorn Hall, 3 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

In an event aimed at a mainstream audience, she gives a lecture titled Math on Trial: Probability in the Judicial Process at 7:30 p.m. in the Benjamin E. Mays Center, 95 Russell St.

Robert S. Langer, one of the best-known figures in engineering, offers two lectures on Friday, Feb. 28, under the auspices of the George S. Hammond ’43 D.Sc. ’73 Eminent Scientist Lectures, sponsored by the chemistry department.

He gives the technical lecture Novel Drug Delivery Systems and the Application of High Throughput Approaches to Drug Delivery and Stem Cell Technologies at 4:10 p.m. in Room 119, Dana Chemistry Hall, 5 Andrews Road (Alumni Walk).

At 7:30 p.m., Langer delivers a talk for the lay audience titled Biomaterials for the 21st Century and How They Will Change Our Lives in Olin Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

All four lectures are open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required for the Langer evening event, available at .

For more information about the Schneps talks, please call 207-755-5978. For more information about the Langer appearances, please call 207-786-6292.

An American mathematician, Schneps is a researcher at the French National Scientific Research Center, specializing in number theory and algebraic geometry.

She has a long-standing interest in the mathematical aspects of crime detection, focusing on ways in which math — through both the correctness of its application and the manner of its presentation by expert witnesses — can influence trial outcomes and lead judge and jury toward the truth, or away from it.

Inventor Robert Langer. (Donna Coveney/MIT)

Schneps and her daughter, Coralie Colmez, co-wrote Math on Trial: How Numbers Get Used and Abused in the Courtroom (Basic Books, 2013). They are members of the Bayes in Law Research Consortium, an international team devoted to improving the use of probability and statistics in criminal trials.

Writing as Catherine Shaw, Schneps has also published several murder mystery novels, set in the legendary mathematics department of Cambridge University in the 19th century and built around a real math problem that tested the greatest minds of the time.

The annual Sampson Lecture honors the late Professor Richard W. Sampson, who taught math at �ֲ���ý for 38 years.

Langer is the David H. Koch Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (an Institute Professorship being the highest honor that can be awarded to an MIT faculty member). Langer received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from �ֲ���ý in 2011.

Langer’s work has led to products that treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases. MIT’s Langer Laboratory is on the front lines of turning research discoveries into drugs and drug delivery systems.

Langer has written more than 1,230 articles and has some 512 patents issued worldwide. His patents have been licensed or sublicensed to more than 250 pharmaceutical, chemical, biotechnology and medical device companies. He has received more than 220 major awards, including the U.S. National Medal of Science, the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers.

The Hammond Eminent Scientist Lecture Fund is given in honor of George S. Hammond by his associates and students from Iowa State College under the guidance of Jay K. Kochi. The fund supports lectures by scientists specifically chosen by students and faculty in the �ֲ���ý chemistry department. Hammond, who died in 2005, is widely credited with creating the discipline of organic photochemistry.