"Four ChE Undergraduates Awarded Wentz Research Projects"

 Congratulations are in order.  Four ChE undergraduates successfully competed to be 4 of about 40 OSU students who were awarded financial support from the Lew Wentz Foundation to perform research projects with faculty members during the fall ‘05 and spring ‘06 school year.  Here are a few sentences from each:

 Aleisha McCabe is a freshman, and will be working with ChE Assistant Professor Sundar Madihally. 

“My project title is "Comparison of Antibiotics and Antibacterials."  I will be comparing the ability of antibiotics (Penicillin) and antibacterials to kill bacteria.  Conditions and concentrations will be varied.  This will allow me to analyze effectiveness and the rate at which the bacteria are killed.”

Jeremy Tillman is a freshman, and will be working with ChE Professor Randy Lewis.

 “The title of the wentz project is "ChemE Car Demonstration".  The goal of this project is to test the ChemE Car against a mathematical model and determine efficiency as well as other aspects of the car’s performance as different factors such as nozzle size, volume of water, type of wheels, and concentrations of reactants are changed.  The second goal is to gain results to show off the various aspects of Chemical Engineering to prospective students.”

Manal Gasem is a sophomore, and will be working with ChE Assistant Professor Sundar Madihally.

 “The title of the project is:  The Production of Interleukin-18 Due to Burn Trauma.  I am investigating the reaction our bodies have after a severe burn trauma.  Specifically, I seek to prove that the interleukin-18 (IL-18) molecules are released into our bodies after a burn injury.  By proving that there is a clear presence of the molecules after a burn injury, a burn therapy can then be developed to prevent the release of the IL-18 molecules, which in turn will prevent the muscle wasting and immune deficiencies from occurring as a result of its release.”

 Matt Beier is a sophomore, and will be working with English Professor Edward P. Walkiewicz.

 My project title is Linking the 'Two Cultures':  An Evaluation of Scientific Analogies in Modern Literary Criticism.  The paths of a literary scholar and a research scientist rarely cross in modern times, and C.P. Snow documents this separation in The Two Cultures: A Second Look.  However, literature and science serve the same purpose; they are both media to explain the natural world, and as T.S. Eliot explains in Tradition and the Individual Talent, "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."  Just as the better artist will more perfectly explain the natural world through the medium of language, so will the better scientist more perfectly explain the natural world through mathematics.  With a reciprocal relationship such as this, it is not surprising that modern literary critics have made use of science when examining the literary works of the past century.  The goal of this research will be to examine the ways in which literary critics have employed science to analyze and clarify literature.  The result will be two papers; one will focus on the broad penumbra of general themes in literature and science, such as chaos theory and postmodernism, and the other will focus on specific works, such as the application of thermodynamics to The Invisible Man by Ellison.”

  The students will work for a year with their professor, and will present posters and papers on their results at the April Ceremony.  Selection for the projects is competitive.  Students write a one-page proposal that is reviewed by a board of diverse faculty members representing all of the OSU colleges, who rate proposals on clarity of the idea presentation, value of the experience, and likelihood of a positive outcome.  Yes, an Art professor might participate in rating the engineering students’ proposals, as an engineering professor would participate in rating the proposals from Landscape Architecture majors.  This means that the students must be able to communicate the essence of their discipline specific work to many types of readers.

 Lew Wentz made his fortune in the Oklahoma oil boom of the early 1900s, and left an endowment that the Lew Wentz Foundation manages to give scholarships and project opportunities to students.  By facilitating undergraduate research and student development, his gift continues to make a strong impact on excellence at OSU.