SUMMER OF LAB

During the 2022 Bard Summer Research Institute, Martha Pasatiempo ’25 worked on a study to test whether fungal pathogens found in soils tend to kill many species of plant seeds or are “specialists” and kill only one or a few species. A fungus that kills only its host plant species and does not harm others could play a role in maintaining plant diversity by preventing the host species from dominating plant communities.

Ah, the summer job. For some of us it was about beer money, for others it was how next semester’s tuition got paid. After four months in classrooms, art studios, and science labs, it was a breath of (not always fresh) air to be painting houses, picking fruit, or mowing lawns. I loved working for Buildings and Grounds, and got pretty good at navigating the mower along the steeply sloped terraces overlooking Blithewood Garden. A day’s work there was incredibly satisfying, not least for the bracing bliss of slipping into the fountain at the end of a long, hot shift.

Students like math major Rose Xu ’23, however, are less likely to be bagging rays than to be conducting X- ray spectral and image analysis as part of the Bard Summer Research Institute (BSRI). She spent the summer working with Assistant Professor of Physics Shuo Zhang studying the supermassive black hole at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*, pronounced sadge-ay-star). Xu analyed X-ray observations coming from the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), run by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), with the goal of detecting variability of Sgr A*. The information will inform future experiments using the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)—a virtual Earth-sized telescope made up of eight radio observatories around the world—which detects high-energy X- ray light and studies some of the most energetic objects and processes in the universe. Last May, the first direct image of Sgr A* was released by EHT, and Zhang, who is a coauthor on six papers about Sgr A*’s Event Horizon Telescope results, recently received a $91,933 grant from NASA to support her investigation “Joint NuSTAR and EHT Probe of Sgr A*: Flares, Black Hole Shadows, a New Hard X-Ray Source.” Part of the grant will support the training and involvement of next summer’s cohort of three Bard undergraduate research assistants.

The majority of the 59 students working in this year’s BSRI spent long days, mostly in the lab, mostly on their feet, mostly doing the kind of repetitive work that makes up so much of graduate work in the sciences. All told, there were projects overseen by Bard faculty in chemistry, biology, physics, environmental science, math, and psychology. Another aspect of BSRI that resembles graduate school is that students publish papers with their professors, an achievement that is unusual for an undergraduate.

Sagittarius A* Image: EHT Collaboration

Raed Ibraheim ’13 worked with Associate Professor of Chemistry Swapan Jain as an undergraduate. Ibraheim came to Bard with the singleminded goal of going to medical school, but his work in the lab opened up a new world to him. “I loved it,” says Ibraheim. “It was a great challenge to think of a scientific hypothesis, troubleshoot experiments, and interpret results.” In 2012, his work led to coauthorship on the paper “Syntheses, characterization, density functional theory calculations, and activity of tridentate SNS zinc pincer complexes based on bisimidazole or bis-triazole precursors,” which was published in the advanced inorganic chemistry journal Inorganica Chimica Acta. “I decided to hold off on med school and work in labs to gain more research experience,” Ibraheim says. He went on to earn a PhD at University of Massachusetts Medical School and he is now a research scientist at Tessera Therapeutics, where, he says, he is “enjoying gene writing.”

More recently, Craig Anderson, Wallace Benjamin Flint and L. May Hawver Professor of Chemistry and director of undergraduate research in the Division of Science, Mathematics, and Computing, was the corresponding author on “Photophysical Properties of Cyclometalated Platinum(II) Diphosphine Compounds in the Solid State and in PMMA Films,” with coauthors including Bardians Belle Coffey ’21, Lily Clough ’23, Daphne D. Bartkus ’23, Ian C. McClellan ’21, Matthew W. Greenberg ’15 (visiting assistant professor of chemistry), and Christopher N. LaFratta (associate professor of chemistry). The paper, which was published in the American Chemistry Society’s journal ACS Omega, was a continuation of a 2020 study, “Platinum Complexes from C–H Activation of Sterically Hindered [C^N] Donor Benzothiophene Imine Ligands: Synthesis and Photophysical Properties” that was also published in ACS Omega, with Bard coauthors Coffey, Leslie Morales ’22, Greenberg, Matthew Norman ’14, Michael Weinstein ’13, and Garrett Brown ’20.

Sage Saccomano ’23 found the BSRI experience invaluable. “I hadn’t had much lab time previously," she says. "BSRI allowed me to get much more comfortable with techniques, concepts, ideas, and the process of publishing a paper.” Saccomano hopes to be part of the program again next year, possibly continuing the work she did this summer running experiments on the enzyme dihydrofolate reductase, under Jain’s supervision, with the goal of finding a new anticancer drug. Some of us have seasonal gigs ridding a garden of weeds, others are working to rid the world of cancer. —James Rodewald ’82