Welcome Rebecca Whelan

The Chemistry Department Welcomes Rebecca Whelan

Associate Professor of Analytical Chemistry

Rebecca Whelan hails from the small town of Hartland, Wisconsin and completed her undergraduate studies—majoring in Chemistry and English—at Lawrence University in Appleton. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University in the lab of Richard Zare. As a graduate student, Rebecca’s main research interest was employing biological recognition and amplification to develop novel detectors for microscale separations. She demonstrated the use of single-cell biosensor detectors in capillaries and microfluidic devices and innovated the use of a miniaturized surface plasmon resonance spectrometer as a separations detector. She also spearheaded the creation of the Stanford Chemistry Department’s Writing in the Majors course. For this curricular development work and her contributions as a teaching assistant and head teaching assistant, Rebecca was awarded the Walter J. Gores Award, Stanford’s highest honor recognizing excellence in teaching. Her postdoctoral training was completed with Robert Kennedy at the University of Michigan Department of Chemistry, where she built an instrument coupling capillary electrophoresis with laser-induced fluorescence anisotropy detection and used this instrument to study cell signaling mediated by G-proteins and G-protein coupled receptors. The first 14 years of her independent career were spent at Oberlin College, a liberal arts institution in northeast Ohio, where she established a research program focused on structurally characterizing ovarian cancer biomarkers and developing new affinity reagents to detect these markers. Undergraduate researchers were central to Rebecca’s research during this time, since Oberlin does not have a graduate school. While at Oberlin, she trained and mentored 69 undergraduate students, 33 of whom appear as co-authors on peer-reviewed publications. The Whelan lab’s research was supported by competitive grant funding from the Dreyfus Foundation, Research Corporation, the Society for Analytical Chemists of Pittsburgh, and the National Cancer Institute. Rebecca enjoyed teaching general, analytical, and bioanalytical chemistry and contributing to Oberlin’s First-Year Seminar Program with a course called “Marie Curie’s Legacy: Radium Girls and Glowing Matter.” During her last four years at Oberlin, she served as Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Rebecca then spent four years as Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame, where she expanded her research into mass spectrometry proteomics and the analysis of authentic patient samples. In July 2022, Rebecca moved to KU along with three devoted graduate students. Being affiliated with the Ralph N. Adams Institute for Bioanalytical Chemistry is a dream come true for Rebecca: the innovative research conducted in the KU Chemistry Department—past and present—has been an inspiration since her days as a graduate student. This excitement is amplified by the access to truly world-class resources and potential for collaborations on the Lawrence campus and through the KU Cancer Center. Rebecca is looking forward to continuing to teach, train, and mentor students, employing her diverse bioanalytical skill set to address important issues in women’s health. She has moved into a house on the southeast side of Lawrence and is having a great time getting to know her new hometown.

DCU Exchange

DCU’s Jamie Somers has an ultrafast summer

The summer exchange student representing DCU this summer was Jamie Somers, who worked in the lab of Prof. Chris Elles to measure the ultrafast dynamics of a molecular switch. Although Jamie has previously worked with nanosecond lasers in his research back home in Ireland, it was an entirely new experience for him to work with femtosecond lasers in the Elles group. Working with KU graduate student Dan Johnson, Jamie used ultrafast spectroscopy to monitor some of the fastest events responsible for the photochemistry of the molecular switch, and even helped identify new timescales involved in the reaction. Jamie is shown in the photo sporting a KU sweatshirt while he works on the laser. He wore a lot of KU and other Kansas-related gear this summer after the airline lost his luggage on the way here.

KU Chemistry Newsletter 5