May 2002

Last summer's Rall scholars included Austin Williamson and Erin Roden, left, with models of fullerene molecules, and osmolyte researcher Jeanette Fiess, right.

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Stanley Rall, ’65, who retired in 1993 as senior scientist and associate director of the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease at the University of California, San Francisco, has “strong opinions about the worth of student-faculty research,” he said. He funded the Rall summer research program because he himself lacked such an opportunity and found his inexperience a disadvantage in graduate school, he said. He noted also that undergraduate research projects give students a chance to find out if they have “the inclination and aptitude for research.”

The achievements of Whitman’s student researchers “just bowl me over,” said Rall, who spent several post-retirement years mentoring young scientists at the Gladstone Institute. “The sophistication and quality of Whitman students’ work is remarkable. How advanced they are in scientific training compared to when I was there is almost incomprehensible.

“I am particularly pleased that they write and talk about their work. As one of my mentors told me about research, ‘If you haven’t written about it or spoken about it, you haven’t done it.’”

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Whitman College’s Stanley Rall Award gave 11 students a chance for paid jobs last summer working on research with their professors. The Rall Award, established by 1965 Whitman graduate Stanley Rall, Jr., is one of several award and grant programs that make it possible for faculty and students to collaborate on research by funding stipends and supplies.

Last summer’s Rall scholars tested the waters in six fields of study, and several ended up reporting their research at professional conferences
or submitting it for publication.

• Hilary Hudson, Jeanette Fiess, and Jennifer Hom worked with biology professor Paul Yancey to analyze osmolytes in deep-sea animals found in natural gas seeps. “The deepest animals from the Alaska and Japan Trenches at 15,000 to 21,000 feet were found to have a totally new kind of osmolyte compound, perhaps explaining for the first time how life can survive at such crushing pressures,” Yancey said. Yancey’s team presented their results at an international meeting in Brest, France, in October.
  
  
• Students Austin Williamson, Erin Roden, and Jeremy Thorn took on two projects related to professor Kurt Hoffman’s continuing study of fullerene molecules. In the first, they worked to identify the source of near-infrared emission from the films of erbium metallofullerenes which they fabricated in the lab. The second project involved making fullerene crystals containing infrared emitting molecules.
  
  
• Collaborating with physics professor Mark Beck, senior Andrew Dawes worked on an experiment to perform precision measurements of weak optical fields using a CCD array detector. He continued to take experimental data as part of his honors thesis, and he and Beck plan to submit the work for publication in Physical Review.
  
  
• Matthew Silver joined geology professor Kevin Pogue in his work on clastic dike networks in Missoula Flood slack-water deposits in southeastern Washington. They inspected excavations in the Hanford area, analyzed satellite images, and conducted field work along the Touchet, Walla Walla, and Snake rivers. They were to present their work at the West Coast meeting of the Geological Society of America in May.
  
  
• Visiting physics professor Marty Ytreberg and senior Hutian Liang worked on ferrofluids (magnetic fluids). Their object was to create computer simulations of the fluids, involving both the translational, or lateral, and the rotational motion of particles.
  
  
• Professor Heidi Dobson and biology students Heather Carew and Scott Rinear worked at the Ecological Research Station at Uppsala University in Sweden. In one project they studied the bellflower-specialist bee to identify the stimuli it uses to select its host flower. The second study focused on whether plant selection in pollen-specialist bees is genetically determined or influenced by chemical imprinting to their larval diet.