Science and Liberal Arts Work Together

Dear Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Community,

Science and creativity go hand-in hand. Science is often perceived as a objective, analytical, and dry, and an overlooked key to success in science is creativity and imagination. Science is carried out by humans, and the humans doing the science bring their whole selves to their work. The other skills and experiences that a person has outside of science can help them in their scientific and career endeavors as well. This is one of the reasons we love being at DePaul: our students get a chance to explore their interests in areas besides science in the Liberal Studies part of their degrees. 

Our Chemistry and Biochemistry majors take a wide variety of courses outside of science. Bin-bin Schell, a junior BS Biochemistry major at DePaul took an animation class (ANI 101), and as a part of her classwork, she decided to incorporate her biochemistry studies into he final project. Animations like these are useful for helping to explain science topics to both students and the general public. This is just one great example of how important non-science classes can be in our educations. The link to Bin-Bin’s animation is below!

This animation shows the process of translation on a cytoplasmic ribosome. Specifically, a peptide is synthesized and folded in a chaperonin

Research Lab Virtual Open House This Week

This week, the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is having a Virtual Research Open House Week. Students of all majors and levels are welcome to learn about the research that many faculty do outside of class! Several of our research-active faculty are having zoom times specifically for students to drop in an learn about their research.

The schedule has been sent out the instructors to post on their D2L sites or email out, so check your D2L site and/or email for more info.

Some faculty are accepting research students in the next few quarters even though we are currently remote.  Some research can be performed remotely, or you can plan for research in person later. You can learn about all of the faculty’s research interests by looking at our faculty biographies here: https://csh.depaul.edu/academics/chemistry/Pages/faculty-staff.aspx

Even if you can’t make the times this week, you can always email faculty directly to reach out and discuss their research and the possibility of potentially doing research in the faculty’s laboratory.

Also, we wanted to re-share the link to join the Department’s Discord Server. All students (of all majors), faculty, staff, and alumni are welcome to join!

See you around on zoom and discord!