From Students to Scientists
The Potential for Discovery
Undergraduate Research in the Department of Natural Sciences Dr. Dennis Drake and T. Ryan Sullivan in the chemistry lab. By Kathryn Dunn
“I have no idea how that happened…”
T. Ryan Sullivan, then a junior biology major, stared at his results in the research lab of chemistry professor Dr. Dennis Drake. He had expected to see a decrease in iodine’s absorbance, which would be signaled by a change in color from its inherent deep purple to pink. After running two trials, however, Ryan was stumped: in one trial, the iodine had slowly faded from purple to white. In the second, it remained a deep purple. Ryan understood that there were two possible explanations for what he was observing: he had made an error, or he had discovered something new. After checking and re-checking his work, Ryan was still “banging his head against the wall.”
Ryan relates the discussion that followed with Dr. Drake: “We both said ‘Oh! That’s something we’ve never seen before!’”
“Research is always beset with setbacks,” Dr. Drake said. “It’s just part of the game. False starts and new starts are all part of the fun.”
“It’s very gratifying to see this learning take place,” Dr. Drake reflects. “Students reach a point where they can approach the self-sufficiency of a graduate student. Ryan reached the point where he literally became a co-investigator. He’d come up with new ideas; we could talk colleague to colleague, not just student to teacher.”
After Ryan spent three days checking his work and applying the analytical approaches he’d learned in the lab, he arrived at a new possibility: maybe the light that triggered the reaction was being absorbed by something else.
Ryan understood that he had turned a corner in his development as a scientist: “Now I was actually thinking on my own.”
Elms College Magazine Spring | 2010
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