February 8, 2007.

Caitlyn and PJ at the CSW’s Awards Dinner

The Chemical Society of Washington awarded Caitlyn Faller (C’07) and Paul (PJ) Lukac (C’07) with the College Chemistry Achievement Award.  In recognition of outstanding achievement in college chemistry, the CSW awards its College Chemistry Achievement Award to a senior majoring in Chemistry or Biochemistry.

While participating in the Army ROTC program and varsity athletics, Caitlyn Faller, a native of Fredericksburg, Virginia, performed undergraduate research in the de Dios lab studying the interactions between antimalarial drugs and heme (a waste product of hemoglobin degradation that is toxic to malarial parasites) by conducting NMR experiments and molecular dynamics simulations.  She has co-authored a paper published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.  Her work was part of a large collaboration project at Georgetown University focusing on heme-targeted anti-malarial drugs supported by funding from the NIH.

PJ spent the past year in the Weiss lab synthesizing and characterizing a wide variety of room temperature, reversible ionic liquids.  Ionic liquids have the potential for use as environmentally friendly solvents as well as in asymmetric syntheses.  Those that were developed became ionic upon passing CO2 gas through a mixture of an amidine and one of a number of either an amine, or amino acid methyl ester, or amino acid alcohol.  Subsequently, after bubbling N2 gas, the ionic liquid would revert to a mixture of starting materials.  PJ’s research was funded first via an Adams’ Fellowship for the summer of 2006 and, then, via two GUROP semester stipends for Fall 2006 and Spring 2007.