Prof. Miriam Bowring [chemistry, 2016-] has received a $43,500 research grant from the Murdock Charitable Trust to support her research in organometallic chemistry. The grant, which will provide funds for three years, is being supplemented by a grant of $11,400 from Reed College.
Miriam plans to use the grant to investigate “whether and how atoms can behave not as particles, but as quantum mechanical waves. To do so, we are using metal-containing molecules, which hold promise as energy-efficient catalysts for green chemistry and alternative fuels.”
The project got off to a fast start this past summer. Five students – Zac Mathe ’17, Oleks Luschyk ’17, Cordero Ortiz ’18, Ellis Douma ’19, and Josephine Keller ’20 – worked in the Bowring lab this past summer, and the students working on this project successfully prepared one of the sought-after organometallic compounds, started work on making a second compound, and also began the quantum mechanical calculations that will be used to interpret their measurements.
Miriam presented results from the summer at the Organometallics section of the Gordon Research Conferences, and she is also making plans to take several students to the Murdock College Science Research conference in November and present their most up-to-date results.
Summer 2017 Bowring lab (L to R): Ellis Douma ’19, Josephine Keller ’20, Oleks Luschyk ’17, Cordero Ortiz ’18, Zach Mathe ’17, Prof. Miriam Bowring & 4-legged friend