BE SEEN

We prowled around Bonney Science Center during its first year — 2021–22, when masks were mostly on — interviewing and photographing the folks who teach, research, and support students and faculty in a new facility that puts science on display.

STORY BY JAY BURNS PHOTOGRAPHY BY PHYLLIS GRABER JENSEN

A spray bottle of Murphy’s wood soap in one hand and a rag in the other, Dave Hanscom, one of three custodians in Bonney Science Center, wipes down a long wooden study table in the big lounge known as the Living Room.

Asked what he was thinking, he said, “My next task — it’s a pretty big room.” The next task might be taking out his trusty Windsor Sensor XP12 to vacuum up all the sand tracked inside on this winter day, or check for smudges on all the glass that surrounds him.

Bates’ newest building has expanses of glass. Two huge exterior glass curtain walls give views of campus. Inside, the classrooms and labs have glass walls. For custodians, lots of glass means more work. “But I like it,” says Donna Gendron, one of Hanscom’s fellow custodians, for how it lets folks see and feel the rattle and hum of all the teaching and research going on inside the labs and classrooms. Hanscom agrees. “Seeing the students working in the labs: That’s cool.”

Opened in 2021, Bonney gathers faculty in traditional science disciplines who share research interests and laboratory needs, many of whom are engaged in bioscientific pursuits that develop solutions that sustain, restore, and improve the quality of life for humans, plants, and animals in our world.

There are chemists who apply their skills to biological questions. Biologists who have skills in chemistry, and chemists who do neuroscience — and vice-versa. For students and faculty, it’s an inclusive environment.

In short order, Bonney has attained its goal of “recreating advanced scientific environments in an undergraduate setting,” says Michael Hinchcliffe, Bonney’s lead architect and a principal at the firm Payette.

We’ve prowled Bonney, interviewing and photographing the folks who now work in a building that puts science on display. Here’s what we saw.

Walk This Way

From the Living Room, it’s a few strides down the hall to an organic chemistry teaching lab.

On a November day, Lorna Clark, an assistant in instruction in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has an attentive group of 19 students getting ready for the experiment of the day, how to isolate and purify clove oil.

Assistants in instruction are lab linchpins who work closely with students. As Clark says, “being close by is a big part of the job.” She has been at Bates for 31 years, but never tires of teaching 18- to 22-year-olds. “It’s still such a great age. I love working with these students.”

The desktop computers in Bonney’s teaching labs allow students to keep electronic notebooks to submit to Clark after a lab, rather than hand-written ones. But old-school notebooks are still in play in Bonney’s various research labs. “There’s a lot to be said for learning to draw in organic chemistry, like learning how to draw compounds,” Clark says. “If you just cut and paste it, you don’t learn it!”

One floor above Clark, her colleague Amy McDonough is teaching her microbiology students how to “flame a loop,” which prevents contamination of pure laboratory samples.

Flaming a loop is done when a scientist takes a sample of live bacteria from a bottle or tube and transfers it to a petri dish using a thin wire with a tiny loop at the end that serves as the specimencollection surface. During the transfer the wire and rim of the bottle or tube are both “flamed” with a Bunsen burner to sterilize them and ensure bacteria don’t escape.

McDonough enjoys “those moments when a student may be struggling with a concept and you work with them, making them think — like a scientist — and then you see the light bulb go on.”

Clark also maintains some of the department’s instrumentation, including the most expensive instrument in the building, the Bruker Ascend 400 nuclear magnetic resonance instrument, used to study the physical, chemical, and biological properties of matter.

In Bonney, the NMR is one of the first things you see when entering the building, on full display behind a big window near the Living Room, like an exhibit at a science museum. Its location sends an intentional message: science is accessible.

When the chemistry labs were back in Dana Chemistry Hall (recently renovated to focus more on science teaching), the NMR was behind a locked door. Students submitted their samples for a teaching assistant to run. Which meant that the NMR was “a black box to the students,” says Clark.

Now, “students can walk right over, load their own reaction sample, and analyze their own data,” explains Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Andrew Kennedy. When Kennedy taught undergraduate organic chemistry at his Ph.D. institution, “students didn’t even get to analyze samples, partly because undergraduates didn’t rate.”

The NMR in Bonney was made possible by Dennis Keith ’65 and Jo-Linda Leib Keith. Dennis was a chemistry major who earned a Ph.D. from Yale and had a long and successful pharmaceutical career.

D:

Keith remembers Dana Chemistry Hall, which opened in his senior year, as just a hole in the ground. “He took organic chemistry when Hedge Hall was the chemistry building,” says Kennedy. “It’s pretty incredible that he would be connected to Bonney Science Center this way.”

The Wall

Touch the wall along a Bonney hallway: The material is mostly pinboard, to encourage all sorts of science communication.

Far down the hall from the Living Room, a section of pinboard features a rogue’s gallery of sorts, photos of ticks taken by students with a scanning electron microscope. It was for a Short Term course on tick-borne illnesses taught by Paula Schlax, the Stella James Sims Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, who researches Lyme disease (more later).

In a classroom near the critters, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Geneva Laurita is teaching students in her chemical reactivity course. They’re all around the perimeter of the room, using the room’s 360-degree expanse of whiteboard to discuss and calculate the heat exchange that occurs when cold water is added to a hot water bath.

A solid-state chemist, Laurita’s research concentrates on materials with energy and electronic applications, and she’s recently won a major National Science Foundation grant to further her research, which focuses on “what the structure of a material is, how atoms interact with one another, and how that gives rise to physical properties — for example, how does it conduct electricity or interact with light?”

In addition to whiteboards, Laurita also uses the room’s projection screens to display, for example, an animation of the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon where electrons are ejected from a metal surface when placed under a light source with sufficient energy.

Projecting information can be useful, similar to how a traditional lecture imparts information, but wherever possible Laurita uses the whiteboards.

“They allow students to make observations and work problems in groups in a way that can be shared with everyone in the class,” she says. “This puts the collective knowledge and approaches of the entire class on display.”

Safety First

Across the hall, Jonathan Witt makes an observation as he gives a tour of the building’s storage of various chemicals and lab equipment, from pipettes and petri dishes to test tubes and beakers and other glassware.

“Chemists used to die young,” he says. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, chemists had a cavalier attitude toward the dangerous chemicals in their labs, touching, smelling, and tasting them. “And they smoked in their labs,” says Witt, the safety technician and chemical stockroom manager for the natural sciences at Bates. All of which led to early, and sometimes explosive, deaths for more than a few.

Today, Witt and others at Bates follow a range regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and other federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, to keep Bates science labs safe. In OSHA terms, Witt is the college’s “chemical hygiene officer.” In other words, he says dryly, “I do a bunch of safety stuff with chemicals.”

In Bonney, Witt showed us how flammable chemicals have their own room that is its own “control area” with fire-rated walls and floors. Special lockers keep dangerous and “nasty” acids locked away. All the other chemicals are stored in their own room.

The equipment stockroom has storage space in the center, seven shelving units — the space-saving, sliding kind like in a library — and shelves, cabinets, and drawers along the room’s periphery.

Many of the faculty in Bonney moved from Dana Chemistry Hall, now simply Dana Hall. During the move, Bates executed a plan for the safe disposition of all the old and unneeded supplies and equipment.

It was a lesson learned, says Witt: No more pack-ratting. When it comes to purchasing equipment or chemicals, “if we have it, don’t order it.”

Down Three Flights

Downstairs from the stockroom, Mary Hughes, the vivarium coordinator, watches intently as a new student worker, Emily Walsh ’24 of Sausalito, Calif., learns to count rotifers under a microscope.

Rotifers are tiny microscopic invertebrates that, among other attributes, are food for the larval zebrafish that Hughes and her student workers raise in the vivarium.

A powerful model organism in biological research, zebrafish have helped scientists develop therapies for muscular dystrophy; better understand certain cancers, including mesothelioma; and, in a Bates lab, research how toxicants affect the development of aquatic species.

In the vivarium, rotifers are cultured in buckets filled with salt water and a rich amount of nutritious algae, then fed to the larval zebrafish. While it’s easy to measure a cup of chow for a dog, it’s hard to measure out the correct number of rotifers at mealtime. (And like any creature, larval zebrafish require a specific serving size.)

Walsh was learning how to take a small sample from the total serving of rotifers, place it under a microscope, and count the rotifers with a clicker.

From that count, a mathematical formula is used to extrapolate the total number of rotifers in the serving. From there, adjustments can be made to the serving’s “food density” before the rotifers become the fish larvae’s next meal.

Walsh is just learning this complex process. As with learning any skill, getting good at rotifer counting is “about repetition,” says Hughes. And like any good teacher, she doesn’t expect her student workers to be adept right off the bat. “You’re going to be bad before you’re good,” she says.

Students have to learn how to manipulate a special counting slide, called a Sedgewick-Rafter cell, which is not easy. At first, “you’re going to set it up wrong. You’re going to put the slide on wrong.

You’re going to put the cover slip on wrong. It just takes practice.”

And while there’s only one way to execute the task, Hughes sees many reactions from students.

“Everyone’s different. Failing bothers some more than others — they want to get it right the first time. But I always warn them: ‘You’re not gonna get this the first time. And it’s okay if you break a slide If you don’t get the count correct the first time, it’s okay. It’s like algebra: you’re not gonna get it right the first time.’”

And working with students and teaching them a skill? “The best part of my job,” she says. “I love to see them gain the confidence they need, and tell me, ‘I got this!’”

Up Six Flights

From Hughes’ ground-floor vivarium, it’s six flights of stairs to the second floor. There’s the quick route, via utility stairs; the easy route, the elevator; or the scenic route, the signature Monumental Staircase that provides a view of campus through a massive window known as the Beacon for how it shines at night, welcoming students.

Across the hall from the second-floor landing, Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks and Associate Professor of Biology Larissa Williams share a lab space — and a teaching perspective.

Banks and her student researchers explore preclinical drug development, “mostly in the area of antimicrobials for both bacteria and viruses,” she says. Williams does research on how toxicants affect the development of aquatic species, such as zebrafish, a model organism used in biological research.

As a teacher, Banks seeks to provide a “landing pad” for students, “a safe environment for them to screw up some stuff and figure it out.” And when they fail, Banks helps them get back up and try again — or try something new.

“When you put the right opportunity in front of them, you just see their whole personality change.

They’re like, ‘I didn’t know they made this part of science before, but I’m glad they did. I want to go play!’”

Both professors appreciate the way the inclusively designed spaces in Bonney Science Center blur the distinction between teacher and researcher, physically reinforcing a major thrust of the college’s $75 million drive to improve STEM facilities and education: to ensure that any Bates student who is interested in STEM be provided with resources.

With their colleagues, Williams and Banks have developed innovative CURE courses, which offer Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences. Such courses give students real research experiences early in their career — not to accelerate the process, but to improve how students learn, by doing real, hands-on research.

For example, Williams’ students did investigations on how poison exposure affects animals. “Literally, this is science,” she says. “I have no idea how any of this is going to turn out.”

Getting Antsy

From the Banks and Williams lab, it’s to a spacious lab inhabited by biologist Ryan Bavis and two neuroscientists, Jason Castro, who looks at the neural circuitry that gives us the sense of smell, and Martin Kruse, who looks at how neurons speed around our bodies telling us what to do.

“We used to all be isolated in our labs” back in their former digs in Carnegie Science Hall, says Bavis. “This is a more collaborative environment.”

Last winter, Bavis was also sharing his digs with ants. Specifically, Lasius nearcticus, the yellow meadow ant, and Tetramorium immigrans, the pavement ant.

The critters were part of honors thesis research by biology major Etti Cooper ’22 of Denver, Colo. Bavis, the Helen A. Papaioanou Professor of Biolog- ical Sciences, was her adviser. She was investigating how temperature changes might differently affect pavement ants, which spend their lives above ground, and the entirely subterranean meadow ant.

Cooper didn’t have to go far to collect her specimens. The pavement ants came from, well, pavement: the sidewalk outside Carnegie Science Hall. And the meadow ants came from, well, a meadowish place, around Mount David.

But because ants refuse to wear name tags, Cooper spent careful time in the lab confirming the taxonomic identification of her specimens, i.e., whether the ants actually were who Cooper thought they were.

“It’s difficult to tell some species apart, even under the microscope,” explains Bavis. Although

Bavis and Cooper were confident of their identification, Cooper sent a few specimens off to an expert at Providence College, James Waters — whose lab website is LoveTheAnts.org — to confirm the identification. Last spring, Waters was the outside examiner in Cooper’s thesis defense.

Cooper compared changes in the metabolism of the two species when exposed to temperature changes.

Bavis is a respiratory physiologist whose primary research looks at how the nervous system controls breathing in mammals and birds. “I know almost nothing about ants,” he admits, “but Etti’s interest in ants and my interests in all things physiology converged.”

On Purpose

A few steps down the hall is a purposefully purposeless space, Room 283, where Bates folks can meet, discuss, laugh, and figure things out.

On an April day, the room was the scene for a lively meeting between Associate Professor of Neuroscience Jason Castro and two of his thesis students, Johnny Loftus ’22 of Palo Alto, Calif., and Juliet Bockhorst ’22 of Westwood, Mass.

There were some light moments as the trio used the whiteboard to sketch out some charts reflecting the work the students were doing in “principal component analysis,” an important technique in statistics and data science.

After a difficult, month-long project, the two “had identified what might be two new cellular subtypes,” explains Castro, “using machine-learning techniques to determine whether these cells could be classified into different types.”

He doesn’t recall the reason for the levity. “Juliet may have been talking about some of the challenges she faced when trying to label neurons” — which was key to the project — “and was making light of it.”

Castro’s lab researches how we smell. (Not if we’re smelly, but how our olfactory system works.)

Take the various and tantalizing smells that hit Bates students as they walk toward Commons for a meal. Whether it’s the allure of barbecue tempe, bacon and ham pizza, paprika-braised mushrooms, or tiramisu coffee cake, it’s simply chemicals hitting and stimulating the collective Bates nose.

“Although we know we can smell a huge number of volatile chemicals, we still don’t understand exactly how this information is handled by the olfactory bulb — the part of the brain that receives incoming signals about smells,” Castro says.

H: Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks teaches cellular biochemistry in Bonney in November 2021. The class was reviewing a community-engaged project with Lewiston Middle School that explored the science behind nutrition.

I: In November 2021, Etti Cooper ’22 holds a plastic “critter carrier” containing Lasiusnearcticus , the yellow meadow ant, which she collected on Mount David last fall for her senior honors thesis in biology with her adviser, Helen A. Papaioanou Professor of Biological Sciences Ryan Bavis. Cooper is now a doctoral student at the University of South Dakota.

J: In the lab of Assistant Professor of Biology Lori Banks, thesis student Osceola Heard ’22 holds an agar plate on which E.colicells had been cultured. The notations indicate that the E.colicells were expressing, or producing, a specific segment of protein associated with the harmful rotavirus.

K: Summer students in the lab of Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Colleen O’Loughlin created this pyramid of nine paper-towel stickies, each carrying the name of a strain of bacteria that the lab tested. The students rearranged the pyramid according to how the day’s experiments went.

Up And A Way

Climb another 24 steps of the Monumental Staircase, and you’re on Bonney’s third level, home to chemists and biochemists. And writers.

In his research, Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Matthew Côté uses sophisticated instrumentation to look at the electronic structure of solids and the interaction of light and matter.

In his office, he says he spends “a surprising amount of time with some form of dictionary and English-usage books.” He turns to those sources because he often writes and designs supporting documents for his upper-level courses “rather than having students purchase ridiculously expensive textbooks whose scopes don’t really match my intentions for the courses. That means I do a lot of writing.”

On one October afternoon in 2021, Côté was meeting with two seniors doing year-long theses, Chris Dye and Seren Parikh. Both have graduated and are now in Ph.D. programs, Parikh at Michigan, Dye at Notre Dame. Côté turned to the whiteboards to describe the Raman effect, which explains how particles of light “gain or lose energy as they scatter off a ‘sample of interest,’” he says.

Weekly thesis meetings provide one-on-one opportunities for the seniors “to learn the unfamiliar parts of the science underlying their thesis projects.”

Good Kagaku

Around the corner from Côté’s office is a lab that, thanks to a tradition born 15 years ago, people around the world would know is devoted to chemistry.

Years ago, students of Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Jennifer Koviach-Côté began to use Sharpies to write the word “chemistry,” in the language of their home or heritage, on a fume hood in her old Dana Chemistry Hall lab.

The Japanese character for chemistry, kagaku, kicked it off. Over time, other students from other countries followed: Nepali, Russian, Korean, Spanish,

French, Swahili, Hindi, Singhalese, Hebrew, Norwegian, Lithuanian, Irish Gaelic, English, German, Japanese, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Vietnamese, and Burmese.

That word-strewn hood is gone but not forgotten. In 2021, Koviach-Côté’s thesis students gave her a lab-warming gift: a decal created from a photo of all the “chemistry” translations from the old sash. The decal now greets visitors to her Bonney lab, a symbol of continuity between past, present, and future.

Lasting Legacy

Another symbol of continuity is the endowed professorship held by Paula Schlax, the Stella James Sims Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Sims, Bates’ first female Black graduate, in 1897, was a career science educator who taught future teachers at a historically Black college in West Virginia.

When she’s not teaching courses like biophysical chemistry or chemical reactivity, Schlax is in the lab, helping to bring greater understanding to Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that causes Lyme disease, and the “switches” that control its genes.

The spiral bacteria, known as a spirochete, “is really pretty amazing,” she says. While its genome was sequenced in the 1990s, even today “we still don’t know what some of their genes do.”

In nature, B. burgdorferi is found almost entirely in deer ticks. When an infected tick bites a dog, cat, squirrel, or human, the blood meal starts to come in. And things start to happen inside the tick.

“The temperature that the bacteria experiences in the tick changes. Different nutrients are around. The acidity and salt concentration changes,” says Schlax. “All those things give the bacteria an idea that it’s time to grow up and move out.” Move out of the tick, that is, and move into the mammal.

As part of the moving-out process, the bacteria stops making certain proteins that have helped it bind to the tick host, and starts making new ones — at least 100 new proteins to get ready for the new host.

“I’m interested in how this process happens,” Schlax says. “What are the molecular switches that allow that to occur?” The answers, which are probably related to messenger RNA, made famous by its use in COVID-19 vaccines, will help inform the design of better diagnostic and treatment strategies.

Schlax’s love for research, which always involves students, is palpable, but as she has said, research is the lasting legacy for very few scientists. Through teaching, however, one can “really influence people: help them find what they’re good at, what they’re not good at, what they like, and what they don’t like.”

Teaching and running a lab is the best of both worlds. “I love teaching my students and I love working with them in the lab,” she says

The new spaces in Bonney help spread the love, allowing Schlax, her colleagues, and their students to lift each other up and find new ways to collaborate and build community. “It’s just going to be terrific!” n

Naming the new Bates rowing shell for 98-year-old World War II veteran Ralph Sylvester ’50 “is by far the least that we can do,” said rowing head coach Peter Steenstra

BY JAY BURNS AND FREDDIE WRIGHT

The 98-year-old man leaned forward in his wheelchair and slowly poured a glass of champagne onto the hull of the newest Bates rowing shell. In a soft but steady voice, he said, “I christen thee Ralph Sylvester.”

With that, a big cheer erupted from the crowd gathered in Pettengill Hall’s Perry Atrium on April 29 — the loudest coming from members of the men’s and women’s rowing teams. That’s because the occasion was a hope come true for the Bates rowing program, to name their newest boat in honor of the man who now sat before them: Ralph Sylvester ’50, World War II combat veteran and beloved member of the Bates and Lewiston-Auburn communities.