ACS Award For Research At An Undergraduate Institution

Thomas J. Wenzel, 56, has led an internationally recognized research program for more than 25 years at Bates College, in Lewiston, Maine. That program has led to more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and two books, almost all of which involved undergraduate student coauthors.

As an expert on nuclear magnetic resonance shift reagents, lanthanide luminescence detection, and selective sorbents, Wenzel has developed new reagents and expanded applications for commercially available reagents. He has worked with 100 undergraduate research students whose efforts have been underwritten in part over 20 years through a Research at Undergraduate Institutions grant from the National Science Foundation.

More than 50 of Wenzel’s students have gone on to pursue graduate degrees in chemistry and to subsequent careers in chemistry or related fields. Several of his students are now faculty members at undergraduate schools, and more than a dozen of his students have gone on to careers in medicine. He has also encouraged diversity in the sciences by consistently recruiting students from minority groups to work in his lab.

“The true measure of his worth is the large number of undergraduate students that he has not just taught, but inspired,” notes one colleague. “If we had 50 Thomas J. Wenzels distributed at colleges throughout the U.S., we would never have to worry about a lack of good young scientists.”

A strong proponent of the value of research at an undergraduate institution, Wenzel was cochair of two Council on Undergraduate Research (CUR) national conferences, served as CUR president from 1996 to 1997, and edited the CUR Quarterly from 2001 to 2005. He has published more than 30 articles promoting the value of undergraduate research.

As a chemical educator, Wenzel emphasizes the use of ambitious, project-based, collaborative learning activities in both his introductory and advanced courses. These activities, which he has described in the articles he has written, are a deliberate attempt to incorporate researchlike experiences into required courses.

In 2003, at the invitation of NSF’s Chemistry Division, Wenzel chaired the Undergraduate Research Summit. The report from the meeting provided recommendations for enhancing the quality and quantity of research at undergraduate institutions. More than 6,000 copies of the report were distributed to the academic community.

Wenzel received a B.S. in chemistry from Northeastern University in 1976 and, five years later, earned a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He started as an assistant professor at Bates in 1981 and has spent his career there. Since 1997, he has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry, and since 2006, Wenzel has also chaired the school’s environmental studies program. From 1992 to 1996 and again in 2003, he chaired the school’s chemistry department.

Awards Wenzel has received include the 1999 J. Calvin Giddings Award for Excellence in Education from the ACS Division of Analytical Chemistry. In 2002, he received the CUR Research Fellows Award, and in 2003–04, he was named a Camille & Henry Dreyfus Scholar.

Wenzel will present the award address before the Division of Analytical Chemistry.