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April 2024

The Department of Chemistry is proud to announce its 2024 Award and Scholarship winners. Graduating students include:

• Alexander Laverty – Outstanding Graduating Senior Award
• Trace Clark and Khaled El-Shazly –Chemistry Outstanding Senior Chemist Award (co-winners)
• Brendin Flinn – Alpha Chi Sigma Graduate Research Award

A complete list of our award winners and departmental scholarship recipients is provided on our Scholarship and Awards webpage.

Dr. Laura McCunn won Marshall University’s Marshall & Shirley Reynolds Outstanding Teacher Award. The award is presented to a faculty member who demonstrates superior teaching and is Marshall’s highest award for instruction. The process of selecting the winner is comprehensive and intense. Each applicant fills out a multipage questionnaire about their teaching practices, philosophy, and provide both self-reflections and external evaluations. The selection committee observes the candidates on multiple occasions, receives letters of recommendation from colleagues, and meets with the departments for additional information. The committee then selects the year’s best instructor. Laura’s approach to teaching can be summed up from her application: “The chemist within me wants my students to understand, both qualitatively and quantitatively, how matter and energy are transformed in chemical systems. The teacher within me wants my students to recognize what is true and how we know it is true. … I also want my students to understand the limitations of our knowledge and our abilities. … Finally, I want my students to be in awe of how the universe works. I love seeing my students peer into a beaker full of newly formed purple crystals with a sense of pride in what they made.” An enormous strength of Laura is her adaptability. As with almost all teachers everywhere, the COVID pandemic moved students out of classrooms and behind computer screens for an extended period of time. Laura showed how she was able to turn that difficult situation into a way to increase her interaction with students in office hours and improve her instruction by creating out-of-the-classroom videos to enhance her instruction. Laura has taught in our freshman sequence of courses, including all four lectures and laboratories and both physical chemistry courses. She was a leader in the redesign of those courses when the one-semester physical chemistry course was deleted. She also co-developed, with biochemistry professor Derrick Kolling, a senior level special topics course: Brownies, Beer, and Bacon Chemistry. To summarize, in the words of one of her colleagues “Fifteen years ago, we had a large retirement coupled to the departure of a few junior faculty members and we set out to create a nationally competitive Department of Chemistry. To do that, we examined the best departments and the practices they employed. In doing so, we found a type of faculty member upon which to build our future. That required effective classroom instructors who would also be both excellent researchers and mentors to our students. In recruiting Laura to Marshall, we found a major piece of that future. We could not be more pleased with her.”

Dr. Rosalynn Quiñones won Marshall University’s Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award for senior faculty. This is the university’s most prestigious award recognizing research or scholarship. In her 11 years at Marshall, she has amassed 17 peer-reviewed publications in three distinct areas of research: surface science, forensic chemistry, and chemical education. Successfully pursuing three lines of inquiry at a university like Marshall is nearly unheard of. Her research has brought over $700,000 in external funding to Marshall. As a primarily undergraduate institution, involving students is central to our mission and Dr. Quiñones has had 25 different Marshall undergraduate students providing 33 co-authorships, six different Marshall graduate students with nine co-authorships, and several with local high school students and teachers. Dr. Quiñones has established a large number of external research collaborations with colleagues at Washington & Jefferson College, WVU, Amherst College, California State University at Stanislaus, University of Charleston, and Duquesne University as well as colleagues in other departments at Marshall University. Dr. Quiñones and members of her research group have made 29 presentations at professional meetings and at universities. Of these, 12 were invited presentations and 13 were presentations by her students.
In Dr. Quiñones’ research in surface science, she has coated nanoparticles with specialized acids, which may provide a new delivery system for therapeutic. In forensic chemistry, she has analyzed the cannabinoid content of some consumer products. Her work has shown that quality control of some of these products needs to be improved. Finally, in educational research, her group has merged scientific inquiry with traditional instructional approaches to develop engaging and novel experiments that may be conducted in analytical teaching labs. Describing her research goals, she wrote “… my main objectives are being an excellent mentor, to stimulate students’ curiosity, and to create and publish world-class scientific research. In addition, I want students to step out of their comfort zones and adventure into research and have laboratory experience while they learn how to navigate into their future careers. I have promoted this kind of interaction in my research by having open communication, “hands-on” experiences, and by encouraging the exploration of chemistry.”

We congratulate the graduates of the Spring 2024 semester!

The faculty of the Department of Chemistry wish our graduates the best as they move on to the next phase of their lives and careers.

March 2024

Dr. Rosalynn Quiñones has published a paper titled “An Evaluation of the Cannabinoid Content of the Liquid and Thermal Degradation Analysis of Cannabis-Labeled Vape Liquids” in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (2024, 69, 905-918) with former chemistry undergraduate forensic chemistry major and current student in the Marshall University Forensic Science Master’s program Sara Moreno and professors Lauren Richards-Waugh (Marshall University Forensic Science department) and Ashley Trouten-Ebert (a forensic science graduate student at Duquesne University).  This paper examined nine CBD vaping pens sold commercially in the US for cannabinoid content.  The amounts and identities of the component cannabinoids were studied using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry.   The study found that long term storage can lead to varying cannabinoid content and that, even new, the samples showed significant differences in composition as compared to the labeled amounts.

Dr. Michael Norton will lead one of three sub-projects funded by an award from the Army Educational Outreach Program through an agreement with the Marshall University School of Medicine with Shelvy Campbell-Monroe as Principal Investigator. Awarded March 6, the $36,000 program will support a total of 6 AEOP High School Internships, with two of the students studying DNA based nanostructures with Dr. Norton this summer.  This program is designed to increase participation in STEM college majors by students in historically underrepresented groups, which includes the children of military personnel.  Participation in this program continues a long-running tradition in Dr. Norton’s lab of mentoring high school students doing research during the summer as a way to increase their interest in science.

Dr. John Markiewicz, Dr. Rosalynn Quiñones, and Perin Schray (biochemistry senior) each ran a section of Science Olympiad.

Dr. John Markiewicz and AXE (professional chemistry fraternity) ran a Boy Scout Merit Badge session.

Dr. Rosalynn Quiñones was named treasurer of the ACS Colloid & Surface Division.

February 2024

The Dr. Rosalynn Quiñones, students from her research laboratory and volunteers from First2Network and AXE participated as judges for a science fair in Lawrence County, OH.

Chemistry staff member David Neff and Holden Young (Specialty Agriculture major) presented at Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol (URDC). At URDC, Holden presented an evaluation of three distinct methods of virus particle enrichment with subsequent amplification of virus genome by polymerase chain reaction (PCR).   Ultimately, the PCR data are compiled weekly into a report that goes to CDC and WVBPH and local partners including the Cabell County Health Dept.  Holden and David are the longest serving members of the MUIDSL (Marshall University Infectious Disease Surveillance Lab) which was founded in 2020.

January 2024

Dr. Michael Wade Wolfe will join the Department in August of this year.  He will teach in our organic course sequence.  Dr. Wade Wolfe has a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry with Highest Honors from Emory University in 2016 and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2022 under the direction of Prof. Nathaniel Szymczak.  His dissertation was titled “Advancing Boron Medicated Fluroalkylation Reactions.”  After completing his doctorate, he moved to the University of Oregon for a post-doctoral fellowship working with Prof. Michael Pluth.  Dr. Wolfe has published five papers in major research journals.  At Marshall, he plans to conduct research in areas such as degradative functionalization of polyfluoroalkyl substances and C-F bond activation.

Dr. Derrick Kolling and researchers from his group, Kara Joseph, Hayden O’Dell, Trace Clark, Jessica Crislip, and Brendin Flinn published an article with their collaborators in PLOS One titled “Chemobiosis reveals tardigrade tun formation is dependent on reversible cysteine oxidation.”  The work was conducted in collaboration with Prof. Leslie Hicks and her students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill.  (Dr. Hicks (Prof. of Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and one of her research students, Amanda Smythers, are graduates of Marshall University with degrees in chemistry.). Tardigrades, commonly known as ‘water bears,’ are eight-legged microscopic invertebrates renowned for their ability to withstand extreme stressors, including high osmotic pressure, freezing temperatures, and complete desiccation. Limb retraction and substantial decreases to their internal water stores results in the tun state, greatly increasing their ability to survive. Emergence from the tun state and/or activity regain follows stress removal, where resumption of life cycle occurs as if stasis never occurred. This paper reports the mechanism(s) through which tardigrades initiate tun formation. It describes the use of chemobiosis to demonstrate that tardigrade tun formation is mediated by reactive oxygen species (ROS). Tuns are dependent on reversible cysteine oxidation, and that this reversible cysteine oxidation is facilitated by the release of intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS).
This paper is a major advance in the field of understanding tardigrade cryptobiosis and has been summarized in a variety of popular science publications for the general public such as Scientific American, the New Scientist, and Science News.  Even the major chemistry trade publication, Chemical and Engineering News devoted a page to this important paper.

February 2020

Dr. Leslie Hicks (B.S. in Chemistry, ACS Certified, Class of 2001) won the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s William C. Friday/Class of 1986 Award for Excellence in Teaching.  “The award, created by members of the class of 1986, recognizes one member of the faculty per year who has exemplified excellence in inspirational teaching. The winner is selected from all full-time faculty who teach undergraduates.”  Dr. Hicks is a bioanalytical chemistry faculty member in the Chemistry Department at UNC.  In her award interview, she credited Bill Price of this department as being the best teacher she has had.

October 2019

Prof. Rosalynn Quiñones was a participant in the (West Virginia) Women & Technology Conference held in Charleston on October 21 at the Embassy Suites Hotel.  This year’s conference addressed “the under-representation of women in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), while also encouraging women to excel in these fields.”  Rosalynn was one  of only four faculty members selected to make a presentation.  More information about the conference and a list of all 25 presenters may be found at West Virginia Press.

July 2019

Professor emeritus Gary D. Anderson was named an American Chemical Society Fellow.  The ACS Fellows program  recognizes members of ACS for outstanding achievements in and contributions to science, the profession, and the Society.  Gary’s accomplishments are incredible both in sheer number and in importance.  For example, he has occupied every senior role in the chemistry professional fraternity Alpha Chi Sigma and won its lifetime achievement (John Kubler) award.  He has played a senior role at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Gary has chaired and been a member of numerous ACS committees as well.  At Marshall, Gary was the first chemistry faculty member to win the university’s Distinguished Service Award and was instrumental in introducing electronic courses on campus.

April 2019

Jessica Crislip and Yiannakis Lysandrou are two of ten Marshall undergraduates selected to participate in its Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) Fellowship program.  Each year, ten students are selected for this program, which is sponsored by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Division of Science and Research.  The students spend 10 weeks working in the laboratory of a faculty member (Profs. Derrick Kolling and John Markiewicz, respectively) to better develop their scientific skills.  The Huntington Herald Dispatch covered this with an article.

Prof. Rosalynn Quiñones was granted tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor.  Rosalynn has accomplished quite a lot as an Assistant Professor.  She has mentored 17 different undergraduate students on research projects over the past six years, more than half of whom have presented their work at professional meetings.  She and her students have published an amazing 7 papers earning her Marshall’s junior faculty member Distinguished Artists and Scholars Award.  Her service has likewise been recognized through consecutive Faculty-in-Residence Awards from Marshall.  She routinely does national service as well, for example being a member of the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s content committee for their You Be the Chemist national competition for children since 2013.

This month, Profs. Laura McCunn, Bob Morgan, Mike Norton, and Rosalynn Quiñones and John Rakus led groups of students to the American Chemical Society’s National Meeting in New Orleans and the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology’s national meeting in Orlando, respectively. In all, 12 undergraduate and 4 Masters students traveled to these meetings, nearly all of whom presented their work as part of the trip.

March 2019

Prof. Laura McCunn was awarded a 2-year, $100,000 grant by the US Department of Energy to study the thermal decomposition of cyclic, oxygenated hydrocarbons.  These molecules frequently occur in the processing of plant material into biofuels, so it is important to understand how they react at high temperatures in order to predict the efficiency and environmental impact of biofuels.  She and her students will also construct a quadrupole mass spectrometer to expand their capabilities in detecting thermal decomposition products.  The grant provides funds to hire two undergraduate students, in addition to purchasing supplies.  The Huntington Herald-Dispatch wrote an article on this grant.

Prof. Derrick Kolling published a paper in the journal Chemosphere titled “Characterizing the effect of Poast on Chlorella vulgaris, a non-target organism” (Vol. 219, pp. 704-712).  Amanda L. Smythers, Armin Garmany, Nicole L. Perry, Ethan L. Higginbotham, P. Ethan Adkins were student co-authors.  Smythers et al. determined that recommended applications of a commercially available herbicide, Poast®, result in catastrophic damage to the photosynthetic machinery of algae. Interestingly, the active ingredient, sethoxydim, in the herbicide formulation does not by itself induce this damage.

Professor Derrick Kolling and Ms. Amanda Smythers participated in Mad Scientist Day at Southside Elementary School on March 22, 2019. They edutained ~500 K-5 students during a morning assembly and ~100 1st graders in afternoon sessions. Students were shown and participated in chemistry demonstrations and activities, informed about research at MU, and which organizations support this research (NSF). The event was covered and photographed by the Herald Dispatch.

January 2019

Prof. Emeritus Joseph L. Roberts passed away at his home in Amity, GA.  He was 89 years old.  Joe received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Oglethorpe College in 1953, an M.S. in Chemistry from the University of South Dakota in 1955, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Cincinnati in 1964.  He was a faculty member in chemistry at Marshall from 1966 until his retirement in 1997.  After retirement he split his time between Huntington and Amity.  Joe had longstanding interests in music (he played for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in college), firefighting, and computers.  He was an avid Marshall sports fan as well.  Joe is survived by his wife June, children Darryl and Mike, and grandchildren Chris, Sarah, Evy, William, and Thomas.  We will miss him.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has designated 2019 as the International Year of the Periodic Table in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the formation of the modern periodic table by Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleev in 1869.   The American Chemical Society held a national contest for groups to represent the periodic table in ways they thought would be interesting.  A student, Amanda Smthyers, suggested that we create a large, human periodic table.  The Department brought together faculty from across the College of Science and School of Medicine, students, administrators on the main basketball court in the Cam Henderson Center to accomplish this.  Joining us were President Gilbert, Provost Taylor, and Vice-President for Research Maher (who is also a chemist).
It was an amazingly fun event, which was sponsored by Contemporary Galleries of Charleston.