Doing Real Chemistry

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Patrick Melvin recently received a National Science Foundation grant that will help fund his lab’s research for the next three years, including support for three undergraduate students to work in his lab each summer. Melvin’s focus is fluorination chemistry, which is an essential building block for developing drugs that treat everything from cancers to cholesterol.

“These students are getting firsthand experience,” Melvin says. “They learn how to properly design an experiment and to perform certain techniques, and those things are all important, but I think it’s the intangibles—perseverance, determination, dealing with failure—that are going to serve them well, whatever they choose to do beyond Bryn Mawr.”