Six students enrolled in Daemen University’s Natural Sciences Program were selected to present their research projects at the 2023 Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry, or MERCURY, Conference over the summer.
The conference, which took place in July on the campus of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, focuses on highlighting research done by undergraduate collaborators.
Jill Baltzley, ‘26, Aleks Selyuzhitskiy, ‘24, Carlos Vargas III, ‘23, Marcelo Astudillo, ‘23, Ryan Danzig ‘23, and Jack Berbert, ‘23, spent the spring working with Dr. Dominic Sirianni as part of an independent study.
“Each of these six individuals did an amazing job of engaging with a completely new subject and embarked on a semester-long course-based research project that was aligned with their professional and scientific interests,” said Dr. Sirianni, an associate professor in the Natural Sciences Program. “Thanks to their effort and dedication, each of these students’ projects were selected for presentation at this conference based on their scientific merit.”
Baltzley, Selyuzhitskiy, and Vargas attended the conference, where they presented their work in two formats: a one-minute promotional talk in front of the entire conference and as a poster in a poster session.
“In both formats, each of the three presented in an exemplary manner, which was relayed to me by several other MERCURY faculty as well as the invited speakers who visited their posters,” Sirianni added.
Each student also wrote successful think-tank grants to fund their travel to Greenville to attend the conference.