Lee Servatius began volunteering at SUNY
College at Fredonia in the summer of 2000. Newly retired from a productive teaching
career as a middle-school teacher in the Fredonia Central School system, he began
working as a research assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Philip Kumler. Lee's major
efforts at that time were carrying out thermal analyses using DSC (differential
scanning calorimetry) and TGA (thermal gravimetric analyses) of a variety of proteins,
part of a collaborative effort between Dr. Kumler's laboratory and one at the
University of Washington.
In the fall of 2002, the Chemistry Department
received a donation of a sophisticated robotic automatic synthesizer (Advanced Chem
Tech Model 496 MOS) arranged by alumnus Dr. Gregory Roth from the major pharmaceutical
firm of Boehringer-Ingelheim. Lee was successful in getting the instrument installed
and up and running. Lee is involved in planning the first instructional use of the
synthesizer in the undergraduate organic chemistry lab for the fall 2002 semester. He
continues to use the instrument to synthesize small peptides for use in Dr. Kumler's
research program. He will also be involved in the lecture-laboratory Combinatorial
Chemistry that will be offered by Dr. Kumler in the Spring 2003 semester. He is a
co-principal investigator with Dr. Kumler on a grant that is in preparation for
submission to the National Science Foundation; this grant proposes to incorporate
combinatorial chemistry and solid-phase methodologies throughout the chemistry
curriculum at Fredonia.
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