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Contact: Jennifer Anderson/Mara Rubino
News Bureau
Northwestern State University
Natchitoches, LA 71497
(318) 357-6466
2/8/2002
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NATCHITOCHES- A Northwestern State University faculty member and student participated in three days of collaborative research at the University of Wyoming recently.
Dr. Martin Rudd, assistant professor of chemistry, and junior Scholars' College student Jeremy Henriques from Ruston continued experiments on crystals Henriques made at Northwestern.
The research was done to fulfill the Scholars' College requirement that students complete a two-year project and undergraduate thesis containing the results. A grant from NSU's Council for University Research Incentive Award (CURIA) funded the project.
Henriques said he and Rudd continued their research at the University of Wyoming to utilize more advanced laboratory facilities. Two experiments performed by Henriques were a nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or NMR, and a single x-ray diffraction experiment. Henriques said the purpose of the experiments was to determine the exact structure and make-up of the grain-size crystals he created.
"The x-ray diffraction experiment gives an actual picture of what the molecule is," Henriques said. "It's a photograph except with x-rays."
Rudd said a crystal was glued to a piece of glass fiber and a beam of x-rays was fired at the crystal during the diffraction experiment. Data was then collected on the crystal by computer.
The NMR "determined the structure of new molecules," said Rudd.
The results of the experiments are significant because Henriques and Rudd discovered a new compound.
"The atoms in this compound have never been put together this way," said Henriques. "There is no other chemical formula that is the same as this crystal."
"We already have publishable results from the work that we only began in earnest in April of last year," said Rudd. "It was especially useful for Jeremy to get plenty of hands-on experience with advanced instruments."
Henriques said the end goal of his project is to make a specialized chemical that can be used for pharmaceutical purposes such as medicine.
Henriques said he has already made plans to return to Wyoming during the summer to continue his work. He will also present his project at NSU's Research Day, held on April 10, in Russell Hall.
Rudd will soon continue research he and two other Scholars' College students worked on, however, this time it will be at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
He has accepted a visiting scientist position this summer at UCSB, whose chemistry department alone with the National Space Foundation awarded Rudd with a $10,000 fellowship.
Rudd said he will continue research of non-linear optical materials that he and undergraduates Melody Heiskell and Jeremiah Newsom have prepared over the past two years.
Working as faculty intern, Rudd said he hopes "to carry out some ground-breaking investigations into some of the properties of the compounds we have made in our Louisiana Space Consortium funded project with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.