V. Faye McNeill

V. Faye McNeill

Mar 02, 2014

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Supporting the Undergraduate Research Experience

By supporting this project, you'll support a student's participation in a 12-week summer undergraduate research internship in my laboratory at Columbia University.

The opportunity to work on a cutting-edge, open-ended problem, without a pat lesson plan, in the company of other scientists is priceless for a student. There's no better way to teach concepts of innovation, uncertainty, critical problem solving, and the je ne sais quoi we refer to as scientific or engineering 'intuition'. Success in the form of a research breakthrough, followed by communicating one's results to the community and the public, builds self-confidence on a professional and personal level.

Personally, undergraduate research was a very important part of my education. Notonly the laboratory experience but especially the one-on-one mentoringinteractions with my undergraduate research advisor, Prof. Richard Flagan at Caltech, have had a strong influenceon my career path, and memories of that experience inspire me to this day. Itake my responsibility to give undergraduate students this kind of opportunityvery seriously. More than 25 undergraduate research assistants have worked inmy group since I started my research program at Columbia in 2007. I give these studentstheir own research project or a role of responsibility in an ongoing project,treat them with the same respect as I do my graduate students, and in general makean effort to help them realize their potential. Amongthe McNeill Group manuscripts which have been published thus far, eight hadundergraduate coauthors, and two had undergraduate student first authors. Alumni from my group are pursuing PhDstudies at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota, University ofCalifornia (Riverside), North Carolina State University, MIT, Harvard, Caltech, and Stanford. Three of those alumni are now NSFgraduate fellows.

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About This Project

Natural materials may provide an effective, economical, and safer alternative to the chemicals commonly used for oil spill recovery today. The use of naturally occurring, soap-like materials in oil spill response could prove less harmful to worker health and reduce the impact of the cleanup chemicals on the environment.

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