Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry Impact Report FY23-24
College of Sciences
Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Fiscal Year 2023-2024
Dear Donor,
I am grateful for the opportunity to thank you for your generous support this past year. Your philanthropic support of the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry has benefted us in more ways than can be enumerated.
Highlights include establishing annual awards to recognize the outstanding researchers, teachers, students, and colleagues; providing two months of emergency salary for graduate students after the tragic and untimely death of Professor Doug Grotjahn; the ability to transport a donated NMR spectrometer to campus; support for our graduate student organization to host a new student mixer and tailgate; an annual beginning and end of the year events with over $1,000 in student awards at each of these events. I am particularly grateful to the alumni of the Grotjahn group who donated so that we could host a Celebration of Life benefting our dear late colleague, Doug Grotjahn.
We are deeply thankful that our generous donors strongly fuel our pursuit of the mission of our department.
Jefrey Gustafson, Ph.D. Chair and Professor Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Changing Lives through Program Support
Charles J. Stewart Fellowship Award in Biochemistry Endowment
This year, the Charles J. Stewart Fellowship Award in Biochemistry Endowment was established in honor of the late professor emeritus, Dr. Jack Stewart. Charles (Jack) J. Stewart was a biochemist with a research interest in CoA. He received his B.A. in 1950 from San Diego State College (later SDSU). He served as Department Chair from 1967 to 1970 and was an infuential fgure in establishing SDSU's frst Ph.D. program, which was in Chemistry.
The memorial gift will provide support for an endowed fellowship award for graduate-level students in the Department of Biochemistry. It will provide a substantial impact on supporting student travel, tuition fees, lab fees, and research expenses.
Hologic, Inc. Science and Technology Scholarship Endowment
This year, additional support was granted to the Hologic, Inc. Science and Technology Scholarship Endowment. The endowment was originally established in 2022 to support students pursuing a degree in the College of Sciences, including the Department of Chemistry, who intend to teach math and/or science upon graduation. The additional support will allow more tuition assistance to students who intend to pursue the feld of teaching after earning their degree.
The late Dr. Jack Stewart
Living the Aztec Experience
Vivian Ferrell, Class of 2024
Class Level: Undergraduate Student College: College of Sciences
Major: Chemistry, emphasis in Biochemistry
Our outstanding undergraduate in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry this year is Vivian Ferrell, who graduated with a 4.0 GPA and performed 3 years of research in the Gustafson group.
During her undergraduate career, Vivian worked on developing atroposelective methodologies for pyrazolopyrimidines. Upon graduation, Vivian will be working in industry in her hometown of Sacramento.
Alyssa Gomez, Class of 2025
Class Level: Undergraduate Student College: College of Sciences
Major: Chemistry with an emphasis in Biochemistry
Junior Alyssa Gomez, one of our top performers in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry and a rising star researcher in the Gustafson group, received the prestigious Academic-Industrial Relations (AIR) Fellowship from Pfzer that is supporting her research in spring and summer 2024.
Alyssa is pursuing a B.S. in Chemistry with an emphasis in Biochemistry and a minor in Honors Interdisciplinary Studies. She is currently working to assist in the synthesis of selective diarylamine kinase inhibitors, where she mainly focuses on optimizing reaction conditions and evaluating if a synthetic step is successful.
Yuan Li, Undecided Class Level: Ph.D. Candidate College: College of Sciences Major: Analytical Chemistry
PhD student Yuan Li was awarded the Department’s Outstanding PhD Research Award.
What separates Yuan from the others, is that she forged her own unique PhD research path entirely from scratch. She jump-started a completely new project in the Holland Lab on hydroxyapatite nanoparticles that led to a new NSF grant awarded last year.
Yuan helped write the grant proposal and has published multiple papers on the Bio-nano interface research topic, which have appeared in ACS (J. Phys. Chem.) and RSC (Soft Matter) journals.
Yuan has also presented her work at numerous international, national, and local scientifc conferences. Most notably, she has given multiple talks on her work at ACS National Meetings.
“ Congratulations, Yuan, on being awarded the Department’s Outstanding PhD Research Award!
Celebrating Shared Success
Recent Rankings
SDSU was ranked overall #108 in Chemistry
Statistics of Interest
Awarded 69 undergraduate degrees, 4 Master's degrees and 2 Doctoral degrees (ASIR SDSU) The Department has consistently improved the numbers and success rate of Underrepresented Minority (URM) students.
Recent Highlights
Laura-Isobel McCall was selected as one of twelve "Emerging Investigators" for 2023 by the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry for her great potential to contribute to research and become a leader in the feld.
Mariam Basilaia and Jefrey Gustafson recently published a paper investigating a particular gene and its potential as a therapeutic target in neuroblastoma cases.
Song Wang and Daniel L. Reinholz conducted an equity analysis of a biochemistry learning setting that used AR as a learning tool.
Title: Associate Professor, Biochemistry College: College of Sciences
Achievement: Christal Sohl, a Biochemist who has been at SDSU since 2015, published a seminal paper in Nature Communications.
In this work, which also included graduate student Matthew Mealka and scientists in the Sohl, Huxford, and Cooksy labs, they used kinetic, structural, and computational methods to identify the active site features among cancer-driving IDH1 mutants that drive their distinct catalytic profles. These mutants produce an "oncometabolite" at widely varying rates, and their discovery of these proteins' unique structural features can have an impact on therapeutic inhibitor binding.
Professor Sohl is also PI of a new MARC grant from the NIH which will fund undergraduates carrying out biomedically relevant research across the department and College of Sciences.
Christal, along with other COS colleagues, also penned a letter that was published in Sciences on the need to collect data on how participating in undergraduate research contributes to student outcomes.
Faculty Achievements
Jing Gu, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor, Inorganic Chemistry College: College of Sciences
Achievement: Jing Gu, an inorganic chemist who has been at SDSU since 2016, continued publishing their work on lean hydrogen generation and plastic upcycling works in prestigious journals such as ACS Nano (2023, 17, 1414-1426) and ACS Catalysis (2024, 14, 5366-5376).
Jing Gu also got the DOE Funding for Accelerated, Inclusive Research (FAIR) grant as a PI in 2023 in collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Lab (Total: $750,000, SDSU: $600,000). The FAIR grant aims to build research capacity, infrastructure, and expertise at institutions historically underrepresented in the Ofce of Science portfolio of DOE.
Laura-Isobel McCall, Ph.D.
Title: Associate Professor, Bioanalytical Chemistry College: College of Sciences
Achievement: We would also like to welcome Laura-Isobel McCall, who came to SDSU from Oklahoma University in the Fall of 2023.
Professor McCall brought almost $6 million in grants to the department, including grants from the NSF, BurroughsWellcome, Chan-Zuckerberg, and several from the NIH.
The McCall laboratory uses cutting-edge analytical chemistry instrumentation to answer critical biological questions. Their main approach implements state-of-the-art ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS).
They are particularly interested in understanding how small molecule spatial distribution relates to function by integrating 3D modeling with their mass spectrometry data, an approach called “chemical cartography.”
