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The Journal of Organic Chemistry, the premier scientific journal in its field, has published a research paper coauthored by William Miles, associate professor of chemistry, and three students who conducted research with him: Gozde Ulas ’05 (Nicosia, Cyprus), a member of Phi Beta Kappa who majored in both French and B.S. biochemistry; chemistry major Elizabeth Dethoff ’05(Reading, Pa.); and biochemistry major Hannah Tuson ’06(Yorktown Heights, N.Y.).
The group investigated a study by Nikolai Kishner, one of the most famous Russian chemists of the 20th century. Along with German chemist Ludwig Wolff, Kishner discovered a fundamental reaction in organic chemistry, the reduction of carbonyls to hydrocarbons.
The students shared the responsibility of developing reactions of Kishner’s furan with a wide range of compounds. A furan is one of a group of colorless, volatile organic compounds containing a ring of four carbon atoms and one oxygen atom, obtained from wood oils and used in the synthesis of other organic compounds.
“They needed to define what were the best conditions for the reaction (what’s the best solvent and the ideal concentration of reagents, how do you purify the resulting product, did we make the desired compound?) in the very best yield and purity, the benchmarks of organic synthesis,” says Miles. “They did an excellent job, at the level where you would expect a good second- or third-year graduate student to perform. Because of the quality of their work and their partial write-up of our results, I was able to write a paper in a very short period of time and submit it to the Journal of Organic Chemistry, the premier journal of organic chemistry.”
The Wolff-Kishner reduction is commonly used in organic chemistry and taught in sophomore organic chemistry classes at Lafayette.
Ulas and Dethoff are enrolled in graduate school chemistry programs at Yale and University of Michigan, respectively.
As a national leader in undergraduate research, Lafayette sends one of the largest contingents to the National Conference on Undergraduate Research each year. Thirty-nine students were accepted to present their research at this year’s conference.