Radford University faculty and students participate in Princeton research fellowship

Radford University Professor of Chemistry Timothy Fuhrer sent a unique email to two of his students this past spring.

“Does anyone want to do a fellowship at Princeton this summer,” the message read.

Athena Smith and Fiona Steinour eagerly accepted their professor’s offer.

Over the summer, Fuhrer and the students worked together but on separate research projects in Princeton University’s Scholes laboratory as part of a fellowship through the university’s Department of Chemistry Visiting Faculty Research Partnership.

Princeton awarded the fellowship to Fuhrer and allowed him to bring along Smith and Steinour.

“I’ve been doing summer fellowships with various research labs for seven or eight summers, and the one thing I always noticed is that they allow graduate students but not undergrads,” Fuhrer, the quantum chemist, explained. “This one strongly encouraged me to bring undergraduates, which I thought was great.”

The VFRP program encourages undergraduates to be involved in research, perfectly matching it with Radford’s mission of promoting undergraduate research with faculty mentors. Radford students from all majors have numerous opportunities to collaborate with faculty mentors to explore new ideas, solve real-world problems and present their work to broader audiences. 

This year, the VFRP program brought students to the lab from Radford and the University of Missouri-St. Louis, offering a unique opportunity for collaborative research and networking.

Fuhrer’s research throughout the fellowship focused on cavity quantum electrodynamics of aromatic compounds. “The idea of this is that some compounds,” the professor explained, “when trapped in a very small mirror cavity, have very different optical properties and can even make hybrid light/matter quasiparticles called polaritons.”

Smith, of Arlington, Virginia, focused her research on excited-state dynamics of methylene blue and a PDI derivative – two molecules already familiar to the Radford team.

“Our goal at the beginning of the summer was to make a polariton, which is a light-matter hybrid state that you put into a cavity,” Smith explained to Princeton communications specialist Wendy Plump. “But we went down a rabbit hole because the silver used for our metal mirrors was interacting with the molecules in unexpected ways. That ended up being my project.

“With the funding we received,” Smith added, “we were able to do a lot of work. We achieved far more data than we expected.”

Steinour, from Gainesville, Virginia, directed her efforts toward protoporphyrin IX, a compound found in brown eggshells that shows promise in renewable energy applications such as solar cells. She presented her findings in a symposium poster titled “Investigating the Photophysical Properties of Protoporphyrin IX for Potential Use in Renewable Energy Applications.”

“We got a few parameters on what worked and what didn’t, so now we’re going to pivot and test a similar, pure porphyrin-IX molecule,” Steinour told Plump while at Princeton. “I’ll also be training back in our lab on the techniques we used here.”

Smith and Steinour worked closely with a Princeton graduate student, Jessica Gaetgens, who guided them through equipment training, lab practices and data analysis.