Alyssa Smale
  • Chemistry
  • Class of 2018
  • Stroudsburg, PA

Alyssa Smale Presents Scientific Research at Disappearing Boundaries

2016 Aug 10

Lebanon Valley College's Alyssa Smale was one of 47 students and 16 faculty from colleges and universities from Central Pennsylvania to present their scientific work from summer research projects at the seventh annual Disappearing Boundaries Summer Research Meeting Wednesday, July 13 at the College's Neidig-Garber Science Center. Smale, a graduate of Pocono Mountain East High School, is pursuing a bachelor of science in chemistry in ACS chemistry at The Valley.

The annual event is designed to uniquely blend students and faculty with their counterparts from other institutions and disciplines. The meeting, brainchild of Lebanon Valley's Dr. Walter Patton, associate professor of chemistry, has become a collaboration of Central Pennsylvania colleges, including Albright, Dickinson, Elizabethtown, Gettysburg, Messiah, and Wilkes, among others. Core to the concept is the idea that science benefits from networking, even amongst a myriad of scientific disciplines.

At the meeting, the Neidig-Garber Science Center was taken over by student-faculty research projects, much of the work recently completed. The summer, being a period in which lack of academic obligations allows for more research, is the perfect time for researchers to share their progress with their contemporaries.

A day of poster presentations and interest group meetings began with a talk by Dr. Michelle Rasmussen, assistant professor of chemistry at LVC, whose work in bioelectrochemistry crosses multiple disciplinary boundaries as her group investigates the development of biosensors for detecting biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases.