Hot Summer Cool Research
Things don’t slow down in the Charles H. Townes Center for Science just because it’s summer.
As if trying to live up to the legacy of the Furman grad and Nobel Prize winner whose name is on the facility, the place hums with activity.
It’s hot outside, but the research going on inside is definitely cool.
“This summer we had 68 undergraduates working, which is a lot of students for a place like this,” says Furman chemistry professor Tim Hanks, who notes that Furman has “the largest undergraduate program in chemistry that I’m aware of in the country.”
Often the students are doing research that they’d usually encounter only after they entered graduate school or went on to a major research university.
Over the years, Furman students have worked in areas from anti-cancer drug design to product development or improvement for companies such as tire-manufacturer Michelin, which has its North American headquarters in Greenville.
Caroline Hansen ’12 from Topsham, Maine, has been working on a project that could have medical implications
in alginate dressings, derived from seaweed for use in the
treatment of wounds.
She has been putting compounds into alginate fibers and trying to coax them into sensing bacteria. “The future of this project is to actually put the alginate into Band-aids,” she says. “Then you can see when a wound is infected. When the compounds sense bacteria, they’ll change color. It’s more or less an optical sensor.”
Caroline says she never dreamed she’d be doing such research at the end of her freshman year of college.
“I knew Furman had a strong chemistry program and a really strong science program in general, which is one of the reasons I chose Furman. I hoped I’d be doing research in the summer between my sophomore and junior years, then between my junior and senior years. But I didn’t know it would be this early,” she says.
“I think this will be a huge development in the medical field, and there are tons of projects you could spin off of the Band-aids. With burn victims, you don’t want to take a bandage off unless you have to because it’s so painful,” Caroline says.
Students in the program often talk about continuity.
Chris Turlington ’10 from Mills River, North Carolina, is conducting research which expands on eight to ten years’ worth of work by previous Furman students. He’s studying how to transfer energy quickly between molecules without losing so much energy in
the process.
“There’s been a lot of talk about being efficient with energy,” he says. “The hope is that we’ll be able to absorb the energy from sunlight and take that energy and do something with it.”
Chris adds, “It’s neat knowing what you’re working on now could and will have an impact later on. The work I’m doing builds off the work of other students who went before me. When we know enough about this to publish papers on it, it will have an impact.”
In the course of his research, he has been in contact with Furman grads who’ve moved on to doctoral programs at Northwestern and Purdue.
Professor Hanks says Furman grads are prized by research universities.
“They know the students they get from Furman are well trained, have a comprehensive background, and know what lab life is like,” he says. “In a graduate program, you spend a lot of time in a lab. If you don’t know what you’re getting into, sometimes that’s a shock. It’s better to find that out here than after two years of graduate school.”
Aubrey Turner ’10 from Eads, Tennessee, has been working on a project involving halogen bonding. Furman students assigned this particular type of research could find their work contributing to advancements in thyroid biochemistry.
“There are only a few molecules that are known to form multiple halogen bonds. We’re trying to synthesize some more,” Aubrey says.
She likes the independence she has been given.
“Dr. Hanks is a strong adviser, but he also lets us have some rope, do things on our own and figure out chemistry. I’ve gained immense knowledge beyond our typical lab classes working full-time in the lab over the summer. We’ll go to a professional conference in the fall, and I’m hoping to present a paper,” she says.
Adds Aubrey, “Chemistry is a hard major, but then you look at things our chemistry majors go on to do. We send
a lot of people on to get their Ph.D.’s and to top med schools. I’ve been pre-med, but recently decided to get my master’s in nursing before I make that decision. I think this (summer research project) will help with my admission to grad school.”
Sometimes the students work more than one summer on their projects and continue their work during the regular academic year. There’s even a possibility that a student could devote several years to the same project.
But it isn’t all hard work in the summer.
Taking a break from the lab, the students build camaraderie with other research groups through Iron Man and Iron Woman competitions. They go bowling and have tournaments in everything from ping pong to darts to horseshoes.
Also during the summer, guest lecturers come to Furman.
“It’s run very much like a Ph.D. program would be,” says Hanks.
“You have to keep your wits about you, focus on what you’re doing, and when you run into a problem, you have to solve the problem. Because it’s research, you go to the literature and read and figure out what the problem is. Problem-solving is tough. It takes a lot of creativity and a lot of hard effort to test ideas. That’s what it’s all about.”
The bottom line is to prepare students to face an uncertain future, to succeed in a world where science is ever evolving and where the demand on science to solve problems is increasingly vital to the future of the planet.
Says Hanks, “We can’t train our students for a particular job. The problems they will face might not even exist now. We can help them to approach problem-solving more efficiently.”