Faculty Mentions « The Erlenmeyer Flask

Name: Kristin Ziebart

Area of Study / Position Title: Instructor of Chemistry

Why chemistry? (What about it initially interested you?): I had a fantastic high school chemistry teacher, and it was because of her that I decided to major in chemistry. Chemistry allows me to understand the world around me – and I love explaining to students the “why” behind events that occur in daily life.

Research focus (in non-science terms) or basic job duties? I have been teaching general chemistry in the CH 12x series, both on-campus and online, for the past 2 years. I have also taught a few courses in organic chemistry, such as CH 331 and CH 337. In the coming year, I’ll be teaching the chemistry majors lab course (CH 361, CH 362). I’m looking forward to this new opportunity, not least because I’ll be team-teaching with the same professors that taught me as an undergraduate many years ago.

One thing you truly love about your job? The time I spend with my students, whether in office hours or the lecture hall, is the best part of every day. It’s very rewarding to see them achieve “aha!” moments.

One interesting/strange factoid about yourself. Breaking Bad is one of my favorite TV shows.

Name: Michael W. Burand

Area of Study / Position Title: General Chemistry Laboratory Coordinator

Why chemistry? (What about it initially interested you?): I liked science when I was young since it was a way to understand how the world works. I had an excellent chemistry teacher in high school and was very fortunate to receive a scholarship to study chemistry in college.

Research focus (in non-science terms) or basic job duties? I’m the instructor for general chemistry laboratory sections taught in LPSC. I develop course materials and manage the TAs who teach the laboratories. Occasionally I teach general chemistry lecture sections as well.

One thing you truly love about your job? It’s great to be able to work with colleagues and TAs to come up with new laboratory teaching pedagogies, and I love it when it’s clear something we’ve created is helping students gain a better understanding.

One interesting/strange factoid about yourself. I received my pilot’s license while in high school.

Dr. Paul Blakemore - Associate Professor — Dr. Paul Blakemore – Associate Professor

1. Name: Paul Blakemore

2. Area of study / position title: Associate Professor Synthetic organic chemistry

3. Why chemistry? (What about it initially interested you, etc.)? It requires creativity and you are only limited by your imagination.

4. Research focus (in non-science terms) or basic job duties? New methods and concepts for making molecules with carbon skeletons.

5. One thing that you truly love about your job? Writing and teaching.

6. One interesting/strange factoid about yourself. I play guitar.

Originally posted on News and Research Communications by David Stauth

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Four promising startup companies in fields ranging from social media to chemical manufacturing are among the first “graduating class” of the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator, upon completion of a program designed to help lead them toward commercial success.

Organizers of the new program say it’s off to a promising start in efforts to bring more university research and community ideas to the commercial marketplace. This and other elements of the OSU Advantage form partnerships with industry and work to boost the Oregon economy, while providing invaluable experiences for OSU students involved in many aspects of the program.

“Our program has unfolded as well or better than we had hoped, and we now plan to increase the output,” said John Turner, co-director of the Advantage Accelerator. “Completion of this program means that companies have an increased chance to succeed and have a step-by-step plan to approach the future.”

“Based on our experience in the first year of this program, we’ve decided to conduct two cohort groups each year rather than one,” Turner said. “The coming year will result in about 15-20 new startup companies.”

Success in a tough and competitive commercial marketplace is not automatic, however, and not all companies have the will and strength to complete the rigorous program.

The first graduates have completed a “portfolio” of accomplishments, Turner said, that included training to attract investors, a validated business model, a schedule for future steps, and an initial product to show prospective customers, investors or manufacturers. A few clients are already attracting attention through the sale of products and generating profit.

The OSU Advantage Accelerator provides mentoring with industry and entrepreneurial experts, consulting sessions, access to seed grants and the OSU Venture Fund, meetings with active investors, workshops on various topics, networking events and many other activities.

One of the early participants in the program, Onboard Dynamics of Bend, Ore., plans to market technology that could ultimately revolutionize the way America drives. It has developed systems that compress natural gas right in the vehicle and take advantage of the enormous current supplies of low-cost natural gas. The innovation is able to cut automobile fuel costs to the gasoline-equivalent of less than $1 a gallon.

“An intern working with the Advantage Accelerator performed a lot of tasks relating to market analysis and startup activities that were incredibly helpful to the company,” said CEO Rita Hansen.

“We’re in an excellent position right now, having been formally selected by the Department of Energy for a $2.88 million award, and our initial target markets are the underserved, small, light-duty commercial fleets,” Hansen said. “We’re very bullish about widespread adoption by these fleets of our products.”

A few other companies that have completed the program include:

Pikli, a student-based company based on social media that allows individuals to involve their friends and family in their shopping experiences;
Waste2Watergy, which is commercializing a microbial fuel cell technology to reduce or eliminate significant wastewater costs and produce electricity from the resultant effluence; and
Valliscor, a chemical manufacturing company that licensed technology developed at OSU to produce high-value chemicals for the pharmaceutical, agricultural, polymer and electronics industries.

“The OSU Advantage Accelerator program was very helpful and their mentorship was really first-rate,” said Rich Carter, professor and chair of the OSU Department of Chemistry, and CEO of Valliscor. “They helped us develop the necessary tools to become a functioning company, and whenever you needed advice all you had to do was pick up the phone.”

Carter said he’s “very optimistic” about the company going forward, which is already producing and selling its first products.

The OSU Advantage Accelerator is one component of the Oregon Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network, or Oregon RAIN. With support from the Oregon legislature, collaborators on the initiative include OSU, the University of Oregon, the cities of Eugene, Springfield, Corvallis and Albany, and other economic development organizations. All the participants are focused on creating new business, expanding existing business, creating jobs and helping to build the Oregon and national economy.

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About the Oregon State University Advantage: Oregon State is committed to innovation that leads to new businesses, jobs and economic growth for Oregon and the nation. That commitment now includes the Venture Accelerator, to move promising ideas out of the laboratory and into the marketplace; and the Industry Partnering Program, which helps improve the success of existing business and industry.

By David Stauth, 541-737-0787

Contact: Vincent Remcho, 541-737-8181 or vincent.remcho@oregonstate.edu

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Chemists and students in science and engineering at Oregon State University have created a new type of chemical test, or assay, that’s inexpensive, simple, and can tell whether or not one of the primary drugs being used to treat malaria is genuine – an enormous and deadly problem in the developing world.

The World Health Organization has estimated that about 200,000 lives a year may be lost due to the use of counterfeit anti-malarial drugs. When commercialized, the new OSU technology may be able to help address that problem by testing drugs for efficacy at a cost of a few cents.

When broadly implemented, this might save thousands of lives every year around the world, and similar technology could also be developed for other types of medications and diseases, experts say.

Findings on the new technology were just published in Talanta, a professional journal.

“There are laboratory methods to analyze medications such as this, but they often are not available or widely used in the developing world where malaria kills thousands of people every year,” said Vincent Remcho, a professor of chemistry and Patricia Valian Reser Faculty Scholar in the OSU College of Science, a position which helped support this work.

“What we need are inexpensive, accurate assays that can detect adulterated pharmaceuticals in the field, simple enough that anyone can use them,” Remcho said. “Our technology should provide that.”

The system created at OSU looks about as simple, and is almost as cheap, as a sheet of paper. But it’s actually a highly sophisticated “colorimetric” assay that consumers could use to tell whether or not they are getting the medication they paid for – artesunate – which is by far the most important drug used to treat serious cases of malaria. The assay also verifies that an adequate level of the drug is present.

In some places in the developing world, more than 80 percent of outlets are selling counterfeit pharmaceuticals, researchers have found. One survey found that 38-53 percent of outlets in Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam had no active drug in the product that was being sold. Artesunate, which can cost $1 to $2 per adult treatment, is considered an expensive drug by the standards of the developing world, making counterfeit drugs profitable since the disease is so prevalent.

Besides allowing thousands of needless deaths, the spread of counterfeit drugs with sub-therapeutic levels of artesunate can promote the development of new strains of multi-drug resistant malaria, with global impacts. Government officials could also use the new system as a rapid screening tool to help combat the larger problem of drug counterfeiting.

The new technology is an application of microfluidics, in this instance paper microfluidics, in which a film is impressed onto paper that can then detect the presence and level of the artesunate drug. A single pill can be crushed, dissolved in water, and when a drop of the solution is placed on the paper, it turns yellow if the drug is present. The intensity of the color indicates the level of the drug, which can be compared to a simple color chart.

OSU undergraduate and graduate students in chemistry and computer science working on this project in the Remcho lab took the system a step further, and created an app for an iPhone that could be used to measure the color, and tell with an even higher degree of accuracy both the presence and level of the drug.

The technology is similar to what can be accomplished with computers and expensive laboratory equipment, but is much simpler and less expensive. As a result, use of this approach may significantly expand in medicine, scientists said.

“This is conceptually similar to what we do with integrated circuit chips in computers, but we’re pushing fluids around instead of electrons, to reveal chemical information that’s useful to us,” Remcho said. “Chemical communication is how Mother Nature does it, and the long term applications of this approach really are mind-blowing.”

Colorimetric assays have already been developed for measurement of many biomarker targets of interest, Remcho said, and could be expanded for a wide range of other medical conditions, pharmaceutical and diagnostic tests, pathogen detection, environmental analysis and other uses.

With a proof of concept of the new technology complete, the researchers may work with the OSU Advantage to commercialize the technology, ultimately with global application. As an incubator for startup and early stage organizations, OSU Advantage connects business with faculty expertise and student talent to bring technology such as this to market.

Read the publication here.

Physical Chemist, Glenn Evans began his career at OSU in 1977. Hair was big, bell bottoms were wide and the Bucky Ball hadn’t been discovered yet. He started out teaching a variety of freshman level and graduate courses, taking up Physical Chemistry courses in the late 90’s. Around 2000, he started to cover more and more of the sequence and by 2005 was teaching all three terms. Hard and fast statistics don’t exist on just how many students Glenn has taught in his 37 years at the front of the classroom, but it’s estimated to be somewhere between five and ten thousand.

When asked what Dr. Evans loved most about teaching, he replied, “the “aha” moment when a student sees something and tells me “that wasn’t so hard” almost in a defiant way; private counselling of students (talking them through their anxieties); office hours during which students interact with each other as well as me; in lectures when I say things provocatively to elicit a response and their laughter; exposing the lessons of life embedded in science; among many others. Perhaps the most interesting and most privileged part of lecture is looking out over a sea of faces (with their varying degrees of enthusiasm) and seeing the future and the person I once was.”

Glenn retired in 2010. Four years later, a student decided that he needed to be recognized. During the 2014 Commencement Luncheon, Biochemistry and Biophysics student Omar Rachdi took the platform and read the following speech.

“Two back surgeries, two flights of stairs slipped down in one fell swoop to reveal degenerative disc diseases and scoliosis, two lives lost that cripple me from within because of the differences between the Moroccan culture and the American culture, and only two years have passed. My undergraduate years have been very full of hard and life-changing experiences. However, I would not be where I am today without the guidance and mentorship of Dr. Glenn Evans.

After my second back surgery, I felt demoralized. I did not have the capacity to believe in myself or my abilities until the end of my fall term Physical Chemistry course junior year. Dr. Glenn Evans knew of my physical difficulties and sat me down after the final exam took place. I will always remember him telling me, “You got talent kid. Real talent. You sure you haven’t thought about doing this as a profession?” Regardless of the score I received on that exam, having a person of Dr. Evans stature tell me something like that made a large impact. That moment is the time when I can say that my “spark” turned on inside of me, and for this past year, all that I have tried to do is pass that spark onto others. Whether it be through being a teaching assistant for Biochemistry or Physical Chemistry, the mentoring programs that I have built within the College of Science, or just in everyday conversation, I will always carry with me the kind acts that Dr. Evans has done for me and try to pass them on to others.

Dr. Evans has had a large impact on not just myself, but several other students. If there was a way to incorporate the impact he has had in his career on the lives of his students, his “H-index” would be that of Linus Pauling, and other great scientists that have graced our earth.”

By: David Stauth, OSU News and Research Communications

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Researchers today announced the creation of an imaging technology more powerful than anything that has existed before, and is fast enough to observe life processes as they actually happen at the molecular level.

Chemical and biological actions can now be measured as they are occurring or, in old-fashioned movie parlance, one frame at a time. This will allow creation of improved biosensors to study everything from nerve impulses to cancer metastasis as it occurs.

The measurements, created by the use of short pulse lasers and bioluminescent proteins, are made in femtoseconds, which is one-millionth of one-billionth of a second. A femtosecond, compared to one second, is about the same as one second compared to 32 million years.

That’s a pretty fast shutter speed, and it should change the way biological research and physical chemistry are being done, scientists say.

Findings on the new technology were published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by researchers from Oregon State University and the University of Alberta.

“With this technology we’re going to be able to slow down the observation of living processes and understand the exact sequences of biochemical reactions,” said Chong Fang, an assistant professor of chemistry in the OSU College of Science, and lead author on the research.

“We believe this is the first time ever that you can really see chemistry in action inside a biosensor,” he said. “This is a much more powerful tool to study, understand and tune biological processes.”

The system uses advanced pulse laser technology that is fairly new and builds upon the use of “green fluorescent proteins” that are popular in bioimaging and biomedicine. These remarkable proteins glow when light is shined upon them. Their discovery in 1962, and the applications that followed, were the basis for a Nobel Prize in 2008.

Existing biosensor systems, however, are created largely by random chance or trial and error. By comparison, the speed of the new approach will allow scientists to “see” what is happening at the molecular level and create whatever kind of sensor they want by rational design. This will improve the study of everything from cell metabolism to nerve impulses, how a flu virus infects a person, or how a malignant tumor spreads.

“For decades, to create the sensors we have now, people have been largely shooting in the dark,” Fang said. “This is a fundamental breakthrough in how to create biosensors for medical research from the bottom up. It’s like daylight has finally come.”

The technology, for instance, can follow the proton transfer associated with the movement of calcium ions – one of the most basic aspects of almost all living systems, and also one of the fastest. This movement of protons is integral to everything from respiration to cell metabolism and even plant photosynthesis. Scientists will now be able to identify what is going on, one step at a time, and then use that knowledge to create customized biosensors for improved imaging of life processes.

“If you think of this in photographic terms,” Fang said, “we now have a camera fast enough to capture the molecular dance of life. We’re making molecular movies. And with this, we’re going to be able to create sensors that answer some important, new questions in biophysics, biochemistry, materials science and biomedical problems.”

The research was supported by OSU, the University of Alberta, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.

Originally printed in Terra Magazine – Courtesy of Nick Houtman

Professor Rich G. Carter (left), co-founder and CEO of Valliscor LLC, confers with Rajinikanth Lingampally, a research associate at Oregon State. (Photo: Chris Becerra)

A good recipe depends on high-quality ingredients. That’s as true in industry (electronics, food products, chemical manufacturing) as it is in our kitchens. So when two Willamette Valley chemists developed methods for producing industrial chemicals with exceptional purity, they saw a business opportunity. The result is a new company: Valliscor. Co-founded in 2012 by Rich G. Carter, professor and chair of the Oregon State University Department of Chemistry, and industrial chemist Michael Standen, Valliscor produces organic building blocks for the pharmaceutical, electronics and biotech sectors. Its first product is a compound known as bromofluoromethane (BFM). BFM is a critical ingredient in the synthesis of fluticasone propionate, the active component in two popular medications: Flonase, a nasal spray; and Advair, an asthma inhaler. “The company was created to exploit the synergy between industrial know-how and academic innovation,” says Carter. “Valliscor harnesses licensed technology from Oregon State and from industrial partners to provide unique and cost-effective solutions for producing high-value chemicals. We can provide ultra-high purity materials that are superior to those offered by our competitors.” Before founding Valliscor, Carter and Standen had collaborated on numerous projects over the past 10 years, including the commercialization of an “organocatalyst” called Hua Cat, an advance in environmentally friendly chemical manufacturing. The OSU Research Office and the Advantage Accelerator program have been key to the company’s growth, Carter adds. “We’ve had great mentorship and guidance from the Advantage Accelerator leadership: Mark Lieberman, John Turner and Betty Nickerson. When we get stuck on a problem, they are just a phone call away.” The Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute (ONAMI) supported the company in 2012 with proof-of-concept funding and guidance from commercialization specialists Jay Lindquist and Michael Tippie and from Skip Rung, ONAMI executive director.

CORVALLIS – Lots of startup companies have big ambitions, but Amorphyx’s are bigger than most.

The four-employee company wants to change the economics of manufacturing liquid-crystal displays. Amorphyx team members hope the process they are developing in an Oregon State University lab will be adopted by the world’s largest display manufacturers, who are eager to cut production costs for the screens used in televisions, signage and mobile devices.

But it’s a big job for a young entrant in a market full of Goliaths. Read more…

Article used with permission of author, Mike Francis, c/o The Oregonian

Walt Loveland, et. al, recently published a paper in Physical Review Letters. As part of the publication and promotion, Physical Review Letters, requested a short summary of the article be written in layman’s terms. Below is that summary:

OSU Scientists Explain Synthesis of New Chemical Elements
Exploring the limits of existence of the chemical elements is a driving force for chemists and physicists. OSU scientists (Yanez et al.) have reported (in Physical Review Letters) an important step in understanding
the production of the heaviest chemical elements and their survival. Their novel approach, data and interpretation are ” of key importance for a better understanding”, of the synthesis reactions.

The heaviest elements have been produced by hot fusion reactions at unexpectedly high rates. The authors have measured the survival probability of one of these nuclei, 274Hs, at high excitation energy, finding a unusually high survival and have shown that survival is due to dissipative effects during de-excitation. These dissipative effects decrease the probability of fission occurring in these nuclei and thus increase their survival. This finding helps explain the paradox of hot fusion reactions that make nuclei at high excitation energies (where the effect of nuclear shell structure is “washed out”, and the apparent stabilizing effects of “the island of stability” in these synthetic reactions.

Congratulations all!

Please stay tuned for links to the article!

The Erlenmeyer Flask

Where diverse minds inspire endless innovation.

Category Archives: Faculty Mentions

Who Am I? Wednesday – Kristin Ziebart

Who Am I? Wednesday – Michael Burand

Who Am I? Wednesday – Paul Blakemore

Advantage Accelerator “graduates” moving toward successful new businesses, jobs

New assay to spot fake malaria drugs could save thousands of lives

Glenn Evans Recognized for 37 Years of Teaching and Mentorship

“Molecular movie” technology will enable extraordinary gains in bioimaging, health research

Active Ingredients: Chemists collaborate to form Valliscor

Tiny Amorphyx seeks to reshape the huge, mature business of manufacturing displays

Loveland et. al. publish in Physical Review Letters

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