2022 Chemistry Newsletter

Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Alumni Class Notes
Department Kudos
In Memoriam
Department Lab Updates

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Message from the Chair

Dear Chemistry Department alumni,

Another academic year is upon us, and we are thrilled to be kicking off a fresh round of courses, labs, research efforts and seminars. It feels great to see folks arriving on campus—either for the first time or returning as seasoned veterans. The past year has been noteworthy in several ways. Faculty have published over 30 peer-reviewed publications in first-rate journals, typically with graduate student first authors and often with undergraduates contributing as well. Faculty members submitted five new patent applications and at least three existing patents were licensed. They also doubled the number of research funding submissions from 2021 to 2022 for a total of $13 million in proposals! On top of that, faculty have given over 40 live and virtual presentations at conferences, workshops, panels and other universities.

We bid farewell to about 10 graduating seniors, 6 newly minted PhDs and 10 MS students, who are all headed to enviable next steps including medical school, consulting jobs, PhD programs, federal agencies, industry and start-ups. Well done, and congrats, grads!

We recognized the retirements of Dr. Stuart Licht and Dr. Gail Clements, while welcoming the arrival of Dr. Andrea Cook to run our organic laboratory enterprise and contribute to our teaching efforts. Our roster continues to evolve, and we are just now ramping up our recruitment efforts for a new physical chemistry colleague.

I would like to close with a note of gratitude to Drs. Ed and Virginia Caress. Ed was a chemistry faculty member for a number of years before retiring in 2005 and Virginia had a rich career at the patent office. In 2000, they graciously endowed the Ed and Virginia Caress Lecture Series to bring in high-profile speakers to broaden our own perspectives and show off all the great things the Chemistry Department has to offer. Previous lecture speakers have included Dr. Jill Millstone and Dr. Holden Thorp, and we’ll host Dr. Polly Arnold this fall. A heartfelt thanks for this! We are truly grateful for the philanthropic support from our alumni and friends, no matter the size of the donation.

Thanks for reading and best regards,

Chris Cahill
Department Chair

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Department Spotlights  

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Alumni Class Notes

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Department Kudos

• The GW Department of Chemistry’s U.S. News & World Report rankings jumped 14 spots to the 100th best graduate school for chemistry!
• In the Three-Minute Thesis Contest, a high-speed challenge in which PhD students present their research, chemistry graduate student Dustin Abele sprinted to the finish to win first prize for his green battery proposal. It was covered by the CCAS Spotlight newsmagazine.
• Congratulations to the 2022 departmental award winners! The Madeleine Reines Jacobs and Charles & Elma Naeser research scholarship are particularly important for supporting undergraduate summer research. The 2022 Jacobs Award recipient, Spencer Bystrom, states, “Through the generous Madeleine Reines Jacobs scholarship, I spent a summer devoted to the study of chemistry and organic synthesis. More importantly, I solidified my plans for a future career in pharmaceutical science and research. Thank you for this incredible opportunity!"
• Christopher Cahill received a $750,000 renewal funding through the Nuclear Science and Security Consortium—a five-year National Nuclear Security Administration program to develop a new generation of laboratory-integrated nuclear experts. He also was elected as an AAAS Fellow.
• We are excited to welcome Dr. Andrea Cook to our department. Dr. Cook holds a PhD in chemistry from Georgetown University and a BS in nutritional science from Brigham Young University. She comes to GW from Trinity Washington University, where she taught and developed the organic chemistry curriculum. She is excited to continue to develop the organic chemistry laboratory curriculum to reflect best practices and inspire students to continue learning chemistry inside and outside of the classroom. 
• Undergraduate chemistry student Nora Houseman was selected to be part of the GW CCAS STEM Summer Laboratory Internship program. With mentoring from Professor Joseph Meisel and graduate students, Nora was able to design new molecules which may help target cancer. She was profiled in CCAS Spotlight.
• Jakub Kostal and his group developed a new computational approach to rapidly screen pesticides for safety, performance and how long they endure in the environment. The new approach will aid in the design of next-generation molecules to develop safer pesticides. He was also a speaker at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Council’s Strategy Team on a sustainable chemistry webinar to help the Biden-Harris administration fulfill their commitment to moving the federal effort on sustainable chemistry forward.
• Director of Undergraduate Studies Dr. LaKeisha McClary continues to find new ways to forge strong bonds with undergrads, promote research and the advantages of a chemistry degree as well as a minor in chemistry. This fall, she is teaching our new class Frontiers of Chemical Research, which introduces undergraduates to research in chemistry as each week a different chemistry faculty member presents their research and answers their questions.
• Chemistry undergraduate student Ana Sejak was one of three recipients of the Barbara Willmarth Callahan Scholarship this past year. 
• In June, Dr. Adelina Voutchkova was appointed to the American Chemical Society as director of sustainable development to create a new office of Sustainable Development for the Society and direct the ACS Green Chemistry Institute. This role is consistent with her commitment to advancing green chemistry research beyond academia, and her passion for organometallic catalysis, green chemistry, toxicology and the rational design of safer industrial chemicals. She also served as the co-director of GW’s Environmental & Green Chemistry's Master of Science Program and associate editor of ACS Omega, an open-access journal. 
• The MS EGC Capstone Symposium continues to be a highlight as our MS EGC students presented findings to our external partners from the EPA, NRDC, PhRMA and others.
• Deputy Chair of the Chemistry Department Dr. Martin Zysmilich is currently assisting Dr. Christopher Cahill with daily academic and administrative affairs while serving as the director of graduate studies. He is a member of the CCAS Graduate Affairs, the Student Discrimination Report Committees and was a facilitator in the Summer ACS New Faculty Workshop.

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In Memoriam

We are saddened to share the passing of biochemistry alumna and former president of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Nancy B. Jackson, BS ’79. Dr. Jackson was the first American Indian appointed ACS president. After receiving her BS in chemistry at GW, she went on to earn an MS and PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Texas-Austin. Her life’s work exemplifies her commitment to science and the development of scientists in underserved populations. We are proud to say that she is a GW chemistry alumna and deeply regret her very early passing. We express the deepest sympathy to her family and to the many whose lives she touched.

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Department Lab Updates

Besson Lab

Maegan Dailey, PhD ’22, published an article on phthalocyanine polymorphs in October in CrystEngComm. Graduate students Chenyang Ma and Christopher Hossack published their respective first articles in Dalton Transactions and Inorganic Chemistry. Our lab had an active summer with undergraduate seniors Folasade Abdul and Speline Irakoze, alongside Docia Atanda (REU from the University of Mary Washington) making some interesting discoveries on neodymium complexes, spin crossover functionalization and carbon nanodot fluorescence.

Boyes Lab

Caleb Reese, PhD ’22, defended his PhD; graduate student Rhys Dickhudt presented his 30-minute seminar and passed his candidacy exam; graduate student Nicole Conte presented her 30-minute seminar; and we said goodbye to Dana Sheldon, BS ’22. We also published two peer-reviewed papers on our work in antifouling coatings and in developing high-performance coatings. This past summer was also the department’s first Research Experience for Undergraduates program, which was funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Stephen Boyes is the director of this program, and last summer 12 undergraduate researchers from across the country came to GW to conduct research in the areas of green chemistry and sustainability.

Cahill Lab

The group has had a very productive year, with five publications and a number of presentations by graduate students at national and international conferences. This past summer, graduate student Ben Walusiak received the prestigious Glenn T. Seaborg Fellowship to conduct research on uranium halide materials at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Dowd Lab

New funding has allowed the Dowd Lab to pursue the discovery of novel antibiotics against ESKAPE pathogens. Hailey Butman, PhD ’22, graduated in August 2022 and started a postdoc at the University of Notre Dame with Professor Christian Melander. The group now has three graduate students, one post-bac and two undergraduates. In addition to her roles at GW, Dr. Cynthia Dowd is now an associate editor for RSC Medicinal Chemistry.

Hao Lab

PhD student Ashley Frankenfield received a prestigious ARCS Foundation Scholarship, and PhD student Haorong Li won the 1st place Young Investigator Travel Award from the Washington-Baltimore Mass Spectrometry Discussion Group. Undergraduate Mustafa Ahmed, BS ’22, received the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) Undergraduate Travel Award as one of the five awardees nationwide. The Hao Lab published four peer-reviewed research articles in this academic year. Dr. Ling Hao and four Hao Lab students presented their research at the ASMS conference in Minneapolis in June 2022.

Massiah Lab

The group has a new postdoc, Dr. Anupreet Kaur, who started in November 2021. She has been great in the lab mentoring all the undergraduate and high school students who participated this past 12 months. Undergraduate students Erin Gladu, BS ’22, and Iman Syed, BS ’22, co-authored a book chapter that was published in early 2022. This past fall and spring, we had six undergraduate students and during the summer of 2022, we had eight undergraduate students and three high school students. One undergraduate was from our department’s inaugural REU site program and the other was from Xavier University of Louisiana. Our group continues to participate in weekly group meetings with Drs. Paul Randazzo (NIH) and Rita Miller (Oklahoma State University).

Meisel Lab

The Meisel Lab continues its efforts to design chemical scaffolds for protein surface recognition. Graduate students Ben Kass, Brysa Alvarado, Chris Grubb and Dani Gomes Rodrigues lead the way in these efforts with several manuscripts in preparation. Dani presented her 30-minute seminar to the department titled “Conformational Changes in Amino Acid Based Heterofunctionalized Concave Scaffolds for Protein Surface Recognition.” Dani and Brysa also presented research at the Empowering Women in Organic Chemistry conference in Cambridge, Mass. The lab congratulates undergraduate researcher Carolina Stocchi, BS ’22, on her graduation and wishes her luck in her new job as a clinical research coordinator at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. Rose Milano (class of 2024) and Priscilla Long (class of 2023) were selected for summer internships in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health, and undergraduate Nora Houseman (class of 2023) received the CCAS STEM Summer Lab Internship Award, the Madeleine Reines Jacobs award to support summer research in the Meisel Lab and was awarded the Chemical Society of Washington Prize for the most outstanding junior chemistry major at GW. The lab was overjoyed to welcome its newest member Grace Meisel, who joined the lab (and the world) in April 2022.

Miller Lab

The Miller group has been working on installing a laser heterodyne radiometer (LHR) built by Mesa Photonics for atmospheric column measurements of greenhouse gasses at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. This summer, our GW team—PhD candidate Monica Flores, undergraduate Rachel Greene and PI J. Houston Miller—was joined by Oberlin University's chemistry undergraduate Aman Roy, and Middlebury College's joint environmental studies and chemistry major Isaac Xie. The LHR instrument is housed in an observatory dome built throughout June 2022. In order to automate dome and instrument operation, our summer 2022 crew pushed their programming skills to the limit to get preliminary functions coded.

Rodriguez Lab

Erik A. Rodriguez won first prize in the photographs category of the Elemental Art Contest sponsored by the ACS Division of History of Chemistry & the American Chemical Society. The images showed fluorescence of europium oxide powder. Graduate student Sara Mattson passed her candidacy examination and received the Benjamin D. Van Evera Memorial Prize. The prize is awarded to the most effective graduate teaching assistant in chemistry. Undergraduate researcher Leena Zitoun was selected for the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences' Early Selection Program. Sophomore Joseph Zorn joined the lab as an undergraduate researcher.

Schofield Lab

In collaboration with Dr. Cahill's group, Dr. Mark Schofield co-authored four papers in 2021 and 2022. In addition to these efforts, Dr. Schofield advised three students—Kaitlin Connors, David Rothenberg and Rishiraj Korde—on computational methods to the discovery of ligands to stabilize uranyl complexes for environmental remediation. Kaitlin, David and Rishiraj presented their work at the American Medical Physiology Club Research Symposium in April 2022. In addition to these research activities, Dr. Schofield is preparing to teach two courses this year, including Chem 2122, Chemical Bonding, which draws from his experience in computational chemistry, and Chem 3172, Physical Chemistry II, a course he has been wanting to teach since forever.

Wagner Lab

Kevin McKenzie, Dustin Abele and Michael Womble are continuing their PhD studies, working to turn coal (lignite) to graphite, perfecting Si/graphite anodes to increase the energy capacity of Li-ion batteries and developing next generation Li-air batteries (with up to ~10x the capacity of Li-ion batteries) respectively. The highlight of their research was the publication of “Sustainable Conversion of Biomass to Rationally Designed Lithium-ion Battery Graphite,” demonstrating that the shape of graphite agglomerates, critical to Li-ion battery applications, could be controlled without the huge expense and loss (~70%) of current state-of-the-art commercial methods. The Wagner Lab also developed an inexpensive, safe and environmentally benign route to H-terminated porous Si, material that is currently made by very expensive and dangerous anodic etching of Si wafers in HF. Their material was tested at the Army Research Lab, Rapid and Low-Cost Synthesis of Porous Silicon Powder from Mg₂Si for Energetic Applications, and found to have essentially identical explosive properties, making it a potential “green” primary explosive replacement.

Vertes Lab

The current research project in the Vertes research group focuses on high-throughput single-cell analysis to explore metabolic heterogeneity in different anatomical regions of the soybean (Glycine max) infected by nitrogen-fixing bacteria (e.g., Bradyrhizobium japonicum) using a fully automated f-LAESI ion source. In-depth metabolomics at single-cell resolution provides a unique approach to better understand the molecular mechanism of beneficial symbiosis, such as infections by soil bacteria and its transfer to plants currently incapable of utilizing this mechanism. This year, the Vertes group research has been disseminated via multiple publications. 

Voutchkova-Kostal Lab

The Voutchkova group has seen several milestones in the group this past year. Rebekah Brucato completed her candidacy exam in August 2021 and anticipates her graduation in spring 2023. Darren Dolan completed his 30-minute presentation in January 2022 and is currently working on decarbonylation for late-stage functionalization with senior Zachary Basile, who joined in 2021. The Voutchkova group recently acquired a new instrument from Parr, which they hope to use to further research on plastic depolymerization with sophomore Liz Hartmetz.

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