Prestigious Journals Publish Colby Chemistry Research
Research performed in the laboratory of Dasan M. Thamattoor appears in Nature Communications and is featured on the cover of Chemical Communications
Some of the most life-changing discoveries of our time started with a simple phrase: “What if?”
Take Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), for example. Used in medicine to help diagnose anything from a torn labrum to cancer, it’s now a standard life-saving tool. However, this technology started with fundamental discoveries about nuclear spin by physicists Edward Purcell and Felix Bloch in the 1940s. It wasn’t until several decades later that another scientist, Dr. Raymond Damadian, figured out its practical applications as the medical scanner we know today.
This curiosity-driven approach is exactly what J. Warren Merrill Professor in Chemistry and Natural History Dasan M. Thamattoor practices in his research—and what he hopes to impart to his students. “Some of the most important and exciting applications of science that profoundly affect people’s lives come from fundamental, or basic, scientific research, which contributes to the knowledge pool,” said Thamattoor. “That’s what we do here in our laboratory.”
Top-tier research in an undergraduate laboratory
Lately, that type of basic research is bringing attention to Colby. The results of two recent groundbreaking projects carried out in Thamattoor’s laboratory have been published in two prestigious scientific journals. In both instances, Thomas E. Anderson, the inaugural David Lee Phillips Postdoctoral Fellow, carried out the projects. The fellowship was established through a generous gift from Professor David Lee Phillips of the University of Hong Kong, a longtime friend and research collaborator of Thamattoor’s and a coauthor on the papers.
“These are difficult places to publish in, and it is very gratifying, as folks at a small liberal arts college, to see our work appear in journals like these.”
Dasan Thamattoor
The first paper, published in Nature Communications, describes careful experiments, supplemented by detailed quantum chemical calculations, to successfully generate and investigate a number of severely strained organic molecules, which were previously thought to be inaccessible. These strained systems were generated via highly reactive and short-lived transient chemical species called carbenes.
“We’re in the business of making interesting molecules to see what fundamental insights we can learn. Others have tried and said they were unmakeable, which makes it all the more exciting that we were able to do it in our laboratory here at Colby,” said Thamattoor. “We were able to synthesize and actually describe these very strange systems. And then we developed a general method we could use to explore other related molecules.”
The second paper was published in Chemical Communications and selected to appear on the cover of the December 21, 2024, issue. This highly regarded journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK publishes what it describes as “urgent communications of outstanding significance from across the chemical sciences.”
Said Thamattoor, “We expanded upon the ideas of the Nature Communications paper to a specific system for this second paper, which involved tedious, painstaking work to figure out how these molecules get made. Now we know that they’re made by an unusual mechanism, which was the opposite of what we previously thought.”
A collaborative team of researchers
To bring these papers together, Thamattoor collaborated with a team of experts, which included Phillips and Professor Igor Alabugin of Florida State University. Along with Thamattoor, Phillips provided mentorship and research support for the projects while Alabugin’s group contributed critical computational insights for the Chemical Communications paper.
But the experiments themselves took place not in a high-tech international lab—or at a large research institution—but on Mayflower Hill.
“The experiments were all done at Colby,” said Thamattoor, who is the principal corresponding author on both papers. “The precursor materials were synthesized here, the carbenes and strained molecules were generated here, and the vast majority of the theoretical calculations were also performed here,” he said, noting that both papers went through rigorous peer review to meet the standards of quality required by these journals. “These are difficult places to publish in, and it is very gratifying, as folks at a small liberal arts college, to see our work appear in journals like these.”
Funding for this work came from the National Science Foundation, a federal agency that has provided 25 years of continuous grant support to Thamattoor.
Thamattoor credits Anderson, who is now a visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Middlebury College, for successfully bringing these complex projects to fruition. “Tom came to the lab three years ago as a newly minted Ph.D., and he was absolutely terrific to work with,” said Thamattoor. “Not only was he incredibly productive in publishing these papers, but he also worked directly with Colby students in the lab as a mentor, showing them a path to what becoming a scientist looks like.”
Anderson, who is the first author on both papers, didn’t start with this outcome in mind. Instead, he took a liberal arts approach to the scientific process, letting the experiments lead him down different research paths.
“With exploratory organic chemistry, you eventually hit a spot where something you find doesn’t make sense. This can be discouraging, but I saw it as an opportunity to figure out what was happening,” Anderson said. “In doing the research, we had this conception of what has been done before and what kinds of molecules you can make. I realized that what we thought was impossible actually is possible.”
Anderson credits his time at Colby with teaching him how to balance scientific pursuits and teaching at the same time. “At Colby, everybody has an unwritten understanding that you’ll pitch in and help with anything that needs to get done, which makes you really feel like part of a community,” he said. “I had my own research projects, but I also was helping students every day in the lab. One thing that really impressed me about [Thamattoor] is that he works with students who have different levels of organic chemistry experience or may not be in the major, which is really special. Few professors [outside of Colby] are willing to take the time to let students explore.”
That liberal arts approach is what distinguishes scientific discovery at Colby. Whether students are majoring in chemistry and planning to become lab researchers or majoring in music and interested in how compounds work, there is a place for both in Thamattoor’s lab.
That’s because for Thamattoor, research and teaching go hand in hand.
“When you add a research component to teaching, and you involve young people as partners in the scientific discovery process, that’s what’s fun,” he said. “We have a long history in our lab of publishing regularly with undergraduate coauthors. My goal is to try and help young people, whether they’re undergraduates getting ready to spread their wings and take off, or new postdocs who are aspiring to launch their own independent careers.”
