One year ago the Chemistry department found itself in a bind. Our visiting professor of organic chemistry, Luc Boisvert, was scheduled to begin teaching at the University of Puget Sound in the fall, and our regular professor of organic chemistry, Pat McDougal, had just agreed to extend his stay in the Dean of the Faculty office. With a record number of junior chemistry majors (27) and a bumper crop of intro organic students (81) advancing towards our labs, panic seemed like the only reasonable option.
Fortunately, the situation was quickly resolved when Dr. Aaron Nilsen, a research scientist at the Portland VA Research Foundation agreed to take a one-year leave from his research position in order to teach at Reed. Aaron, who grew up in the coastal redwood community of Ben Lomond, California, first learned about Reed as a UC Santa Cruz graduate student in the lab of Rebecca Braslau ’81 and he had been interested in trying his hand at chemistry teaching for some time. Indeed, once on campus, he quickly saw ways in which his research interests could be put to use in Chem 202 and 343, and he soon attracted a large cadre of hardworking research students.
Aaron describes his approach to research this way: “Organic synthesis applied to chemical biology and medicinal chemistry. Students in my research lab work toward translation of structure activity relationships, derived from previously synthesized compounds, literature and high-throughput screens, to the synthesis of biologically active molecules that provide insight into the mechanisms of action of these molecules on their respective parasitic or viral systems.”
But you can just cut to the chase and say: Aaron Nilsen, Microbe Hunter.