Faculty/student collaborative research is a vital component of Chatham's science curriculum. Majors may begin working with faculty early in their career, supported by Chatham's Faculty/Student Collaborative Research Fund. In the senior year, all students work closely with a faculty member on a chosen research project as part of the Chatham tutorial. Often, results of these projects will be presented in poster form at local or regional meetings, or may even lead to the student's first scientific paper. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the sciences, sometimes the research advisor may be in a different department, and at least one member of the tutorial board must be from another department. Each of the faculty members below are pursuing current research interests and may have opportunities available for students to work together on research projects.
| Roxanne Fisher |
Biology |
| I'm interested in how plant development is controlled by genes and hormones. I use Arabidopsis thaliana, a popular plant model system, to study shoot development. To do this, I generate shoots for study from small pieces of roots in tissue culture. I have been studying the expression of SHOOTMERISTEMLESS (STM), a gene required for shoot formation, during the shoot formation process. I also want to begin studying shoot development in Ceratopteris richardii, a fern. Students working with me on these projects would learn microscopy and tissue culture techniques. |
Specific Projects:
- Expression of root-specific reporter gene during shoot development in tissue culture.
- Expression of STM in meristem mutant lines during shoot development in tissue culture.
- Search for fern meristem mutants.
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| Mary Kostalos |
Biology |
| My current areas of interest are bioremediation using plants in hydroponic (grown in water not soil) I am also interested in environmental estrogens and their effects on development and fertility. My third area is a study of Nine Mile Run and the effects of the slag dump and the remediation efforts. |
Specific Projects:
- Using the hydroponically grown sunflower system to study the uptake of various toxins (with Joe MacNeil in Chemistry). We are particularly interested in having students work on heavy metals.
- Using guppies to look at possible feminization of the males and effects on fertility and reproduction.
- Diversity and numbers of invertebrates in Nine Mile Run. I have a couple of years of baseline data and hope to continue to collect data. This is basic ecological field research.
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| Lisa A. Lambert |
Biology |
| My current active area of interest is bioinformatics: the analysis of data from the human genome project (and other species genomes). To do this, I access protein and DNA sequence information from the many public genome databases and use different computer programs to analyze that information. My main interest is the transferrin superfamily and related proteins. |
Specific Projects:
- Relation of structure to function and evolution of the transferrin superfamily.
- Evolution and structure of transferrin receptor proteins in eukaryotes
- Analysis of proteins causing hemochromatosis including hfe, ferroportin, and juvelin.
- Evolutionary analysis of proteins with homologous lobes resulting from gene duplication and fusion events.
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| TJ Meehan |
Biology |
| I’m a vertebrate paleontologist that specializes in mammal fossils. I have interest in convergent evolution and ecological types, large-scale evolutionary trends, mass extinctions, & global climatic change. I’m most interested in mammal communities of 30 million years ago (the middle of the Age of Mammals) when the earth was in transition from its usual tropical phase to its cold temperate phase. These communities do not have modern analogs—at middle latitudes open habitat became common and a dry woodland habitat was prevalent. There is still so much basic description of fossils to be done, which is the starting point for understanding extinct communities. |
Specific Projects:
- Analyze coprolites from mammalian carnivores for evidence of hair, describe its morphology, and possible ecological significance using modern hair types for comparison. Develop the preparation technique for using scanning electron microscopes to study samples. The evolution of hair likely occurred well over 220 million years ago. The oldest known hair is about 137 million years old. What do casts of fossil hair tell us about an extinct mammal’s life history? Who evolved hair first and when? What was the first fur coat like?
- Describe a new mammal species from its fossil teeth. This entails learning mammalian tooth anatomy and concepts such as what represents a new species. Set up a camera-microscope-computer system for measuring & comparing digital images of small teeth.
- Describe, identify, and interpret a fossil mammal’s functional adaptations and ecology from its skeleton. The Carnegie Museum collection can be utilized.
- Dissection and description of a modern mammal’s anatomy and comparison with others to understand musculoskeletal function.
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| Renee Falconer |
Chemistry |
| My research interests center around the environmental chemistry of pollutants and their transport and fate in the environment. Understanding the movement, distribution and degradation of these compounds in the environment is essential for determining their long-term effects on biota. Determining pathways of exposure for humans is necessary to control adverse health effects. By analyzing various media (e.g. air, water, soil, food, tissues, fluids) for these pollutants, we hope to better understand how human’s actions affect their health and the health of the environment. |
Specific Projects:
- Using chiral pollutants as tracers of biological degradation for pollutant fate studies.
- Studying the movement of pesticides from outdoors to indoors and throughout the home environment.
- Analyzing pollutants in food, body fluids, tissues, etc. to determine levels of human exposure.
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| Joe MacNeil |
Chemistry |
| My interests span a variety of subject areas broadly encompassing environmental inorganic chemistry, with a current focus on the phytoremediation of heavy-metal contaminated water and soil. Amy Anderson ('01) was the first to develop our current model using hydroponically grown dwarf sunflowers. Amy's work with MTBE was recently published in the Journal of Undergraduate Chemistry Research. |
Specific Projects:
- Analysis heavy metals in the environment by profiling the river sediments of the the Alleghany and the Monongahela rivers. Associated projects include the heavy metal profile of liver and kidney tissue from bottom-feeding fish in both rivers.
- Analysis of the incorporation of heavy metals into hydroponically grown dwarf sunflowers (a model we have used now for several years).
- Biodiversity studies exploring the flora of local slagpiles and acid mine drainage sites (done in conjunction with Dr. Kostalos). Students catalog the high biomass plants found at each site and test them for bioaccumulation of various heavy metals.
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| Corey Stilts |
Chemistry |
| My current active areas of interests are the use of Photodynamic Therapy (PDT) as a method to treat bacterial infections and forensic biochemistry. Presently my group is determining PDT’s effectiveness as a treatment for crown gall disease (Agrobacterium tumefaciens) in various species of plants. I also have students involved in determining the time of death (post-mortem interval) in mice by biochemical methods. |
Specific Projects:
- Evaluating PDT as a method to treat crown gall disease: Students will be involved in growing the plants, infecting them with the bacteria and then treating the plants with photodynamic therapy.
- Determining the effectiveness an optimizing the use of PDT on varying bacterial cell lines: Students will be involved in culturing the bacteria (Gram (-), Gram (+), cocci, bacilli, etc.) and administering PDT to determine its effectiveness.
- Determination of the post-mortem interval by chemical/biochemical methods: Students will use laboratory mice as their models to design methods for determining the postmortem interval. The interval range that we will be evaluating will be from 2 days to 2 weeks.
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| Larry Viehland |
Chemistry |
| My research is concerned with the development and application of kinetic theories that accurately describe the transport and reaction-rate coefficients of ions in gases and with developing and testing ion-neutral interaction potentials. Hence I am involved with physical chemistry, mathematics, computing, and atomic and molecular physics. |
Specific Projects:
- Molecular modeling to determine the forces between small ions and small molecules.
- Kinetic theory calculations of the transport coefficients that describe ion motion through gases.
- Mathematical techniques for solving operator equations and partial differential equations.
- Computational science techniques for solving Newton's equations describing the trajectory of an ion or small molecule as it collides and/or reacts with another small molecule.
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