Though some honors students who go on to graduate school in chemistry or in related fields such as medicine or environmental studies use their projects to prepare for their professional careers, most do not pursue their specific projects beyond college and instead prize the honors experience for giving them greater confidence in their intellectual abilities and for allowing them to contribute to the discovery of new scientific knowledge.

Here's a list of honors projects undertaken in recent years:

Recent Honors:

Rebecca Splain (high honors)

Rebecca investigated the conformational flexibility of four naturally occurring enediyne anti-cancer drugs; neocarzinostatin, esperamicin, calicheamicin and dynemicin. She performed exhaustive conformational searches of these molecules and clustered the resulting ensembles into geometrically related families. She used these results to identify molecular similarities and differences and to compare the solution-phase behavior of these drugs with their experimentally determined DNA-bound state conformation. Rebecca completed more than a year of research at HWS including one full-time summer program as an American Chemical Society Research fellow. She has presented the results of her work at the 2003 MERCURY supercomputer conference at Hamilton College in Clinton NY and will present this work at the 2004 national American Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia. Rebecca is the recipient of the 2004 Bullard Prize for Excellence in Chemistry and the 2000 CRC First-Year Prize in Chemistry. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Lambda Upsilon and the Sigma Xi Honor Societies. She is also a member of Hai Timiai, the layout editor for Thel, a recipient of the Betsy Mitchell ’65 Award and was named to the Dean’s List each year of her undergraduate career. She has received numerous awards for her athletic talents on the lacrosse field including being named the IWLCA Goalie of the Year for 2004. She currently holds the record for most wins by a William Smith goalie.

Jen Pratt (high honors)

Jen investigated the conformational flexibility of the potent HIV-1 protease inhibitor drugs Amprenavir, Nelfinavir, Ritonavir, and TMC-126. She performed exhaustive conformational searches of these molecules and clustered the resulting ensembles into geometrically related families. She used these results to identify molecular similarities and differences and to develop a molecular template for further inhibitor drug design. In comparison with other HIV-1 protease inhibitor drugs she determined that seven of the nine drugs share a 3-D common structural motif and cluster into very similar families. She also determined that inhibitors with higher binding affinities show a pre-organization for binding with the protease enzyme.
Jen completed more than 2 years of research at HWS including two full-time summer fellowships. As an undergraduate Jen has had 1 peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic polymers with another one soon to be submitted. She has presented the results of her work at 2 national American Chemical Society meetings and at numerous regional meetings. Jen is the recipient of a 2002 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, a 2001 Council on Undergraduate Research Summer Fellowship and a 2002 American Chemical Society Summer Fellowship. Jen has garnered just about every internal recognition that the HWS chemistry department awards including the First Year Chemistry Achievement award, the Organic Chemistry Achievement award and the Physical Chemistry Achievement award. In addition to Sigma Xi, Jen is a 2003 inductee of the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. Jen is currently pursing the Ph.D. in chemistry at Yale University.

Emelyn Smith (honors)

Emelyn studied the flexibility of large, 42-membered polyazamacrolide rings that have been isolated from beetle pupae. These systems present a significant challenge to modern methods and the results have shed light on interesting O-to-N acyl migration kinetics observed experimentally. Emelyn generated ensembles for four analogues of the polyazamacrolide systems. She found that larger rings, which containing more carbon atoms, are more flexible and possess a higher entropy. However, the results lead to many conformational families that are not oriented for O-to-N acyl migration. The addition of a methyl group to the carbon adjacent to nitrogen leads to less flexibility and ensembles that contain conformational families that are oriented optimally for O-to-N acyl migration. These results provide a molecular interpretation for the experimental observations that the O-to-N acyl migration is more labile in the system with an additional methyl group. These results have recently been submitted for publication to the Journal of Organic Chemistry.
As an undergraduate at HWS, Emelyn has completed more than 2 years of research including two full-time summer fellowships. Emelyn had 1 peer-reviewed publication in the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modeling as an undergraduate and she has another one on the way. She has presented the results of her work at 2 national American Chemical Society meetings and at numerous regional meetings. Emelyn is the recipient of a 2001 Council on Undergraduate Research Summer Fellowship, a 2002 American Chemical Society Summer Fellowship and the 2002 HWS Pim-Tegmo Chemistry Achievement award. In her spare time, Emelyn was a participant in HWS theatre as a stage manager, actor, writer and director.