Apr 30, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. -

By Stephanie Graham
(from Harvey Mudd College Bulletin, spring 2005)

Merck Company Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) selected Harvey Mudd College as one of the award winners in the 2005 Merck/AAAS Undergraduate Science Research Program. The award includes $17,000 a year for three years for student research in biology and chemistry, plus $3,000 a year for programs and activities. Four to six students will participate each of the three years in an intensive, ten-week summer research experience.

The grant will allow HMC to continue efforts to enhance interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. Proposed interdisciplinary research projects include "Interactions of antimicrobial peptides with membrane mimetic systems,""Kerry Karukstis, professor of chemistry; "Development of self-assembled DNA nanoarrays as biosensors," Shenda Baker, professor of chemistry; "Structure and function studies on the plant-specific phosphoinositide phosphatase SAC9," Mary Williams, professor of biology; "Function of dynein accessory chains in Tetrahymena thermophila," David Asai, professor and chair, Department of Biology; and "Covalent trapping studies of the repair of 8-Oxoguanine lesions in nucleosomal DNA," Karl Haushalter, assistant professor of chemistry and biology.

Additionally, the award will allow distinguished scientists to spend several days at HMC and present joint seminars to the chemistry and biology departments and to meet with individual classes. Also included in the grant will be a weekend workshop on chemical biology undergraduate education at which attendees will share success stories for integrating the teaching of chemistry and biology at the undergraduate level.

"The Merck-AAAS Award recognizes the continuing efforts of the departments of Chemistry and Biology to illustrate to our students that contemporary research questions span disciplinary boundaries," said Karukstis, now in her twenty-first year as a member of the chemistry faculty. "Our two departments have collaborated on a number of educational ventures in recent years-the Interdisciplinary Laboratory, the new Joint Major in Chemistry and Biology, and the Beckman Scholars Program in Chemistry and Biological Sciences. We see the Merck/AAAS award as an expansion of this collaboration and a further demonstration of our faculty's commitment to the HMC mission to broadly educate our students."