Excerpts from the Whitman Magazine (December, 2002) (Photographs Adam Hardtke, '03)

TEACHING AND LEARNING CHEMISTRY

The Stevens Atrium is airy and filled with space and light. Rising high on one side is a wall of Texas limestone embedded with thousands of small-animal fossils. A stairway of wood treads in an open framework of steel and glass sweeps up three floors in a shower of natural light from above. Through glass walls two chemistry laboratories are open to view, including one where large exhaust snorkels hang above student workstations equipped with state-of-the-art scientific instruments.

In these labs and three others in this new Science Center, lots of chemistry is going on. If you’re a chemistry student at Whitman College you will spend whole afternoons in a laboratory that has the latest and best instruments and equipment, a stockroom with all your supplies and solutions close at hand, and the most advanced safety features available. Best of all there will be just you, your professor, and fewer than two dozen of your fellow students. If you are a senior chemistry major, you will be working beside your professor in a lab with as few as five or six other students. You may have spent the previous summer working on a research project along with graduate students at a university. Or, you may be collaborating with a Whitman professor on your own research project. “We have high expectations,” says Professor Chuck Templeton. “We expect students both to learn theory and to be able to apply it. We emphasize problem-solving, and we prepare our students thoroughly for graduate school or work in industry.” All senior chemistry majors do original research projects. Often they capture highly competitive summer research positions offered by universities, or they collaborate with Whitman professors in research on campus or elsewhere, such as at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington.

Following the research, students write final research reports, or theses if they are aiming for honors in their major, and they present seminars on their work. The Whitman Undergraduate Conference serves as one opportunity, with many students giving multimedia-assisted presentations or poster presentations. “We really stress the need for students to be able to convey their science not only to other scientists but also to the general public,” Templeton says. Outstanding senior chemistry majors also have opportunities to present their research at professional meetings. Seven students, for example, will accompany Professor Frank Dunnivant this spring to the national American Chemical Society meeting in New Orleans, where they will present their research.

Whitman’s chemistry faculty back up their high expectations for students with daily personal attention. And the new Science Center encourages interaction and collaboration among faculty and students. Faculty members have personal research labs adjacent to their offices where they can work with students, and the building’s many study lounges promote contact between students and faculty. “Students can work together to solve problems. They can write lab reports there, take exams, work with tutors, or just relax,” says Templeton. Most of all, he notes, the lounges make it easy for students and faculty to get together for casual conversation. Informal interaction like this is exactly the kind of experience that is most memorable to Whitman alumni.New laboratories enhance real science with 24 workstations apiece, three laboratories in the new Science Center accommodate eight sections of general chemistry during the week. Each is next to a satellite stockroom which contains the supplies for the day brought from the main stockroom to be dispensed as needed. Next to each laboratory is a “balance room,” containing sensitive instruments on which students can weigh samples as light as a human hair or a fingerprint. Each laboratory has a learning center for pre-lab lectures. “All students can see the chalkboard at the learning center from their workstations,” says Professor Chuck Templeton. “We can do the pre-lab lecture and discuss the experiment, then the students can immediately get to work. In addition, we can leave equations or other information on the board for reference.”

In the organic chemistry lab, each student sets up his or her experiment at a workstation featuring a sink and controls for water, air, lights, voltage, heat, and vacuum. Each of these 24 workstations is contained within a large fume hood, which makes the laboratory safer when volatile or hazardous compounds are used. In addition, the organic chemistry stockroom and the main chemistry stockroom contain vented cabinets for the storage of hazardous and flammable chemicals. Students taking instrumental methods, physical chemistry, or environmental chemistry courses work in a laboratory that contains various pieces of high-tech instrumentation, some designed to do trace analysis of pollutants in air and water. Professor Frank Dunnivant has acquired much of the instrumentation for this lab at little or no cost as surplus from government, industry, or university labs. “We have acquired about $500,000 worth of equipment for approximately $6,000 in shipping charges,” Dunnivant says. Those instruments include two atomic absorption spectrophotometers. Occasionally a piece of instrumentation turns out to be a lemon. In that case, Dunnivant and his students apply it to a different learning experience by taking it apart and using the parts to build something else or to repair existing instruments.

Two seniors conduct research in environmental chemistry:

A s a first-year student, Josh Wnuk became infected with chemistry professor Frank Dunnivant’s enthusiasm. As a senior, he is set on earning a Ph.D. and pursuing a career in environmental chemistry. “Now I get to work side by side with Professor Dunnivant on research that is really meaningful to the ecosystems that are being decimated by industrial practices.” His senior research “revolves around the issue of dredging and the negative environmental impact that it has,” says Wnuk, who is from Lynnwood, Washington. He believes his study will disprove decades of industrial research which has purported to show that dredging is not detrimental to an ecosystem. “Industry says that after the initial fast-release of adsorbed pollutants from a particle of sediment, there is no further significant release, even though a thin filament of pollutant — the ‘slow-release phase’ — still adheres to the sediment. “My research hopefully will show a mechanism illustrating the opposite. Once the particle has settled and is buried by other particles, it is no longer being purged by the water. During this period, the pollutant forms a new fast-release and slow-release phase. When the particle is agitated again, the new fast-release phase is purged, leading to adverse effects on the environment.” Last summer Wnuk was one of three of Professor Dunnivant’s students to work on developing environmental education software packages under a Louis B. Perry Scholar Award. His project took him to waste-water and water treatment facilities to create a survey and an informational film. In addition to working on his own research, Wnuk serves as an organic-lab assistant and instrument assistant for the chemistry department and tutors other students, a task that is “unquestionably one of my greatest pleasures,” he notes. Away from the Science Center, Wnuk works in Penrose Library as circulation student manager. Last fall, adding yet another responsibility, he joined the debate team and plans to continue competing during the spring semester.

Another student, Erin Finn loves the outdoors — hiking, camping, pick-up sports, and especially white-water rafting. It’s not surprising then, that as a chemistry major, her interest is in studies that will help the country clean up hazardous waste.“I’m most definitely an environmental chemist although, as a sort of sideline, radiochemistry is really interesting, too.” The research she did for her senior project is part of the body of continuing research that may develop into a way to clean up the Hanford nuclear waste site. “My senior research involved doing kinetics studies on oxidizing chromium by persulfate with a silver catalyst. The presence of the chromium in nuclear waste makes the vitrification process impossible. Vitrification is the conversion of waste to a stable glass form that can then be stored without fear of corrosion or other breakdown, which is what we are currently experiencing with older steel and concrete containment vessels,” Finn explains. “By finding faster, easier ways to oxidize chromium, we could remove it from the waste tanks at Hanford so that the remaining hazardous waste can be vitrified and put into geologic repositories in a safe form.” Finn, who is from Pullman, Washington, conducted her research at Washington State University, working with Associate Professor Sue Clark. Since completing her thesis, she has returned to Clark’s laboratory to work on other projects in the research group. In addition, last summer she attended the Nuclear and Radiochemistry Summer School held at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Finn is applying to graduate schools for study in environmental chemistry. “I hope to earn a Ph.D. in this field and go on to work with hazardous/radioactive waste remediation.”

The best part of chemistry studies for Finn and her fellow chem majors is “getting to work in the lab. . . . We get to develop solutions to real-life problems and gain experience in analysis of various mixtures of compounds, especially in instrumental analysis. I love learning about all the different instruments. “In addition to all the successes, there have been failures along the way, but those add variety and are in themselves valuable learning experiences. Sometimes figuring out what went wrong is as important to understanding something as being able to say you got pretty results.” Finn’s contributions to the campus include her four years of service on the Renaissance Faire committee. Besides the fun she has helping to plan that annual event, “anything that gets me outside makes me happy,” she says.

A complete descritpion of our Hall of Science construction project and construction photographs can be found at http://www.whitman.edu/offices_departments/chemistry/newbuilding/content.html