Berto Gonzalez ’20 as Puck and Rieanna Duncan ’21 as 1st Fairy in Pomona College’s hip-hop-inspired, gender-bending production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Carolyn Ratteray.
—Photo by Ian Poveda ’21
Blog Articles
In Memoriam: Martha Andresen Wilder (1944–2018)
It’s safe to say that no Pomona faculty member has ever been more beloved among students and alumni than Emerita Professor of English Martha Andresen Wilder, who died on March 24 from multiple myeloma at the age of 74. Over the 34 years of her Pomona career, she was honored by the students themselves seven times with the coveted Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching, setting a record in the 60-plus-year history of the award that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. If she hadn’t been ineligible for four years following each win, she probably would have garnered many more.
Former students remember her for her contagious enthusiasm, her love and thorough knowledge of the material, her always strikingly creative presentation and her deep warmth and kindness. “I can attest to the most luminous, powerful, soul-searching teaching I have ever seen,” one student commented. “She awakens the heart,” said another. “She gives the students a lesson plus the reasons for taking that lesson to heart.”
She is remembered and revered in particular for her legendary Shakespeare classes, in which she was known for her “page to stage” approach, urging her students to experience the Bard’s genius from every possible perspective—as readers, scholars, spectators and actors.
Inspired by the phrase “only connect,” the epigraph from the E.M. Forster novel, Howard’s End, she sought to make the works of Shakespeare relevant to the lives of her students. She would often take an ordinary phrase, like the first line from Hamlet—“Who’s there?”—and lead her listeners through the process of parsing its many levels of meaning, transforming it into something profound, personal and unforgettable. She described the core of her approach as asking students not only for close textual and linguistic analysis of the Bard’s words, but also “to ‘take another’s part,’ to understand and inhabit the Other, always a leap of empathetic, theatrical and moral imagination.”
As each semester came to a close, members of the college community would keep an eye out for her class’s signature culminating exercise—a series of pop-up performances in which groups of students would present a scene from one of the plays, staged in a site of their choosing—from the likely (dormitory balcony) to the unlikely (among the dumpsters behind a dining hall). Many of her former students have called the process of interpreting, conceptualizing and performing a scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays, under her inspiration, one of the seminal experiences of their college career.
Referring to the fact that her Shakespeare classes were always waitlisted as students vied for the privilege of studying with her, Emeritus Professor of English Thomas Pinney once dubbed her “the Pied Piper of the Pomona College English Department,” remarking that, “we joke that she’d have to turn away students if she were teaching the minor poems of John Lidgate.”
A noted scholar of Renaissance literature with a special love for and expertise in the works of the Bard, she was the author of numerous published articles in scholarly journals and was a consultant for such projects as the BBC/TV series “The Shakespeare Plays” and the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre on its original London site. In addition to her famous Shakespeare classes, she taught a range of other courses through the years, including Milton, Major British Authors and the English Lyric Before 1700.
Born March 7, 1944 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Karl and Elizabeth Andresen, she graduated from the University of Minnesota, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa; and went on to receive her master’s degree and doctorate in English from Yale University. She came to Pomona in 1972 after a two-year sojourn on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. For the final 16 years of her career at Pomona, she held the distinguished title of Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English.
In 1992, she was chosen by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education to be the California Professor of the Year and by Baylor University as the recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. In 2000 she was elected a Fellow of the Radcliffe Center for Intellectual Renewal.
A compelling public speaker, Martha was sought after by groups across the country and over the years presented well over 500 public lectures. She was in demand for alumni events throughout her tenure and after her retirement. Although her subjects were drawn primarily from Shakespeare and his plays, three of the talks she gave in the last years of her life illustrate her remarkable range: at the LA Arboretum, “Shakespeare’s Gardens and Green Worlds;” for the American Association of University Women, “Isn’t Wonder Woman Still Among Us?” inspired by her reading of Jill Lepore’s recent history; and at a Gala for the City of Hope Foundation, a personal meditation on the transformation and transmutation she had experienced as a patient, and the way she had come to understand it and to take solace from Shakespeare’s explorations of those states.
In Memoriam: Arthur Horowitz (1945–2018)
Professor of Theatre Arthur Horowitz, who retired last spring after 14 years on Pomona College’s theatre faculty, passed away suddenly in New Orleans on June 16, at the age of 73.
Students who took Horowitz’s classes or took part in the plays he directed described him as kind, generous, funny, inquisitive and always creative. At Pomona, he taught theatre history, playwriting and dramaturgy and was an expert on the dramaturgy of Anton Chekhov and Carlo Goldoni. He also had research interests in the performance vocabularies of commedia dell’arte, Russian biomechanics and Shakespeare in performance, with particular emphasis on international, non-English-language adaptations of the Bard’s work.
In 2011, Horowitz was awarded a grant from the Folger Institute for Shakespeare Studies National Endowment for the Humanities Institute Project, “Shakespeare from the Globe to the Global,” which culminated in the “Shakespeare in Performance Syllabus,” a prototype for courses in international Shakespeare. During his 2017–2018 sabbatical year, he conducted research on the common dramaturgical and emotional threads linking the characters and relationships in Chekhov’s works and those in the late plays of Goldoni.
A graduate of Hofstra University, he earned his Ph.D. from University of California, Davis, in 1997 after 20 years teaching high school English. Before joining the Pomona faculty as assistant professor in theatre in 2004, he taught at CalArts, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly Pomona. Serving 14 years on the Pomona faculty, he was named associate professor in 2010.
His writing was published in such publications as The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Contemporary Dramatists, New England Theatre Journal, The Journal of Beckett Studies, and Western European Stages. His book Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler—International Post-World War II Directors Approach to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2004, and his chapter, “Scrutinizing the feminine in Waiting for Godot,” recently appeared in In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts.
Horowitz was involved in numerous theatrical productions in Southern California, working as dramaturge for several companies, such as the Unknown Theater and the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles and A Noise Within Theatre in Pasadena. He directed a production of Macbeth for the Ojai Shakespeare Festival in 2004, and was on the Board of Directors of Unknown Theater from 2005 until 2011.
In Memoriam: Judge Stephen Reinhardt ’51 (1931–2018)
Judge Stephen Reinhardt ’51, a stalwart of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco who wrote the ruling that ultimately legalized same-sex marriage in California, died March 29, 2018, two days after his 87th birthday.
Known as the “liberal lion” of the federal circuit courts, he was fiercely passionate about the law and protecting the vulnerable. His rulings in defense of criminal defendants, minorities and immigrants were often overturned by the more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.
Among his rulings that the high court overturned were decisions that would have struck down Washington state’s ban on doctors providing aid in dying and a federal law prohibiting a type of midterm abortion that opponents labeled partial-birth abortion. Once, when asked if he was upset by these reversals, he replied: “Not in the slightest. If they want to take away rights, that’s their privilege. But I’m not going to help them do it.”
Born March 27, 1931, in New York as Stephen Shapiro, Reinhardt changed his name after his parents were divorced and his mother remarried. His stepfather was Gottfried Reinhardt, a screenwriter, director and producer whose films included The Red Badge of Courage. His grandfather, Max Reinhardt, was a theatre legend who fled Germany during Nazi rule and gained acclaim in the U.S. for his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl.
Reinhardt once said that the horrors of the Nazis helped shape his conviction about the need to be vigilant in upholding human rights.
A graduate of Yale Law School, Reinhardt was appointed to the federal bench in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. He remained in that role until the time of his death. Previously, he had served as a first lieutenant in the legal counsel’s office of the Air Force, clerked for a federal judge, practiced entertainment and labor law in California, been a member of the Democratic National Committee from California and served on the Los Angeles Police Commission.
“We have lost a wonderful colleague and friend,” said Sidney Thomas, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, which oversees federal courts in California and eight other Western states. “As a judge, he was deeply principled, fiercely passionate about the law and fearless in his decisions. He will be remembered as one of the giants of the federal bench.”
Two Supreme Court justices were among the many national voices that spoke admiringly of Reinhardt in the wake of his death.
“As a person and as a judge, Stephen Reinhardt was devoted to protecting the powerless and the oppressed,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, “In my 43 years on the bench few, if any, judges with whom it has been my privilege to serve were more dedicated to the cause of justice.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor called him “one of the greatest legal minds of our lifetimes.” She went on to say, “We have lost one of the giants of our federal judiciary—one who cared deeply about the way the law could shape our society and impact our pursuit of justice. Someone like Stephen cannot be replaced. He set an example for judging that anyone with a passion for the good in the law should follow.”
A Shale’s Tale
Shale, a fine-grained sedimentary rock formed from silt or clay particles, holds chemical clues to one of Earth’s most dramatic geological events – when continents first bobbed well above sea level.
Using the Pomona College X-ray Fluorescence Laboratory (XRF), Associate Professor of Geology Jade Star Lackey with Trevor Pontifex ’18 and Christopher “Cal” Neikirk ’19 analyzed the chemical elements of shale rock from around the world – providing an important check on the results gathered by University of Oregon Professor Ilya Bindeman’s research, published in the May issue of Nature. “We’re answering a deep time question about Earth’s behavior with this work,” says Lackey.
“The findings are significant. It puts another piece of evidence of when Earth’s continents stood more prominently above the oceans,” says Lackey, who is chair of the Geology Department. “On a planet that was hot and active and had a vigorous mantle before this, it was hard for continental rock to rise really high.”
Lackey provides an analogy: Imagine dumplings in a pot of stew. They begin as dough that doesn’t have much strength, but nonetheless float near the surface of the pot. As they cook and stiffen, they gain strength and begin to rise up above the surface of the pot. If the stew cools and thickens, in the same way the mantle would have, those dumplings could sit even higher. Tectonics would move the dumplings around, and when several collide—think of this as assembling a supercontinent—they can rise even higher.
The research shows that shale rock sampled from around the world contains a record of the weathering of land that spans most of Earth’s history. The team analyzed oxygen isotopes in samples from every continent to test for fingerprints of the style of weathering that occurred. Lackey explains that the conversion process of land (the dumplings in a pot of stew analogy) to clay minerals in shale is recorded in the oxygen isotopes. “It’s profound to think about, that we’re seeing a different style of weathering start [on Earth].”
Lackey joined Bindeman’s research team in summer 2016, when he and laboratory interns took a look at the bulk chemistry of the shales that were sent to their laboratory.
“The important piece of the story is ‘between 2.2 and 2.5 billion years ago, but to see it, we had to go back and scrape ‘together as many shales as we could find, even the rare stuff, going back to 3.5 billion years ago,” says Lackey, who explains that the shales were hard to find and had to be handled with care in the lab.
The Pomona College Geology Department counts on a number of specialized lab instruments for faculty and student research. The XRF Lab was founded in 2010 and uses an Axios wavelength-dispersive spectrometer which allows analysis of a wide range of elements that make up the bulk of crustal rocks. “We operate with ‘the highest level of research thanks to the ‘College’s support for major equipment,” says Lackey.
Alumni Weekend 2018
Alumni Weekend brought together more than 1,500 alumni and guests for four festive days in late April. Friday’s craft beer and wine tasting—A Taste of Pomona—featured alumni vintners and led into dinner under the stars on Marston Quad. President G. Gabrielle Starr welcomed attendees, saying, “All of you have brought a brilliance and energy to the College from which we still benefit. It’s the Pomona of today that honors you for coming back and honors the past, even as we are thinking about the future.”
Throughout the weekend, Sagehens from the classes of 1949 through 2017 crisscrossed campus to hear faculty and alumni speak on topics including St. Francis of Assisi, international education, California wildfires and the future of astronomy. The Parade of Classes marched through the College Gates to the Quad, where alumni were greeted by President Starr’s State of the College. The Class of 1968 gathered in full force for their 50th Reunion, just three years after initiating a new Pomona tradition with their 47th Reunion, and the Class of 1988 celebrated their record-setting reunion gift of $380,431. In total, reunion classes contributed over $1.4 million in support of Pomona’s liberal arts mission and commitment to financial accessibility.
Alumni Weekend 2019 will take place May 2-5. You can find information to plan your trip on the Alumni Weekend website.
Walking Through Time
Alison Rose Jefferson ’80 brings the history of L.A.’s Central Avenue to life.
Buildings tend to stand still. History never does.
Central Avenue, the hub of Black life in Los Angeles during the Jim Crow era, is now more associated with the taquerias and vibrant Spanish-speaking community that share the sidewalks today.
The Lincoln Theatre, nicknamed the “West Coast Apollo” in its heyday for hosting such performers as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Nat “King” Cole and Billie Holiday, now hosts the congregation of the Iglesia de Jesucristo Judá. Yet at the nearby 28th Street YMCA, built in 1926, one can still glimpse the terra cotta likenesses of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass in the upper corners, watching over a building that housed one of the few swimming pools where Blacks were always welcome.
Historian Alison Rose Jefferson ’80 seeks to illuminate both the past and present of this important South L.A. neighborhood in a deeply researched walking tour she created with Angels Walk LA, a nonprofit that has produced 10 other self-guided historic trails around the city. Jefferson and collaborator Martha Groves chose an inclusive embrace, highlighting both the 27th Street Bakery – owned by 1984 Olympic sprinter Jeanette Bolden and known for its Southern sweet potato pies – and the nearby Las Palmas Carniceria, known for its chorizo.
Angels Walk LA will install 15 stanchions highlighting some of the 65 sites along the trail that stretches roughly from 24th Street to Vernon Avenue later this year. They will tell the story of the neighborhood not only to those who live there but to curious visitors and the music lovers who flock to the Central Avenue Jazz Festival each July.
A Different Kind of Historian
A sociology major at Pomona College, Jefferson took an unusual academic path, returning to school to earn a master’s degree in heritage conservation from the University of Southern California in 2007 and a Ph.D. in history at UC Santa Barbara in 2015, 35 years after earning her undergraduate degree.
Her goal was to enhance a career in writing and public projects that has made her a sought-after expert for documentaries and other reports. It is a role sometimes defined as a “public historian,” and just one of many career paths for history majors beyond academia.
“I’ve always been interested in history,” says Jefferson, who worked for a historic preservation firm before pursuing a doctorate. But even as she devoted her days to documenting and preserving brick-and-mortar sites, Jefferson understood that history is what happens within and beyond the walls.
“The world of historic preservation really focuses on the built environment,” she says. “I decided I wanted a broader platform.”
By completing her doctorate, she acquired the training and credentials that bolster her qualifications for various efforts and grants.
“With a Ph.D., I could do a broader array of projects,” Jefferson says.
Among her many endeavors, she has expanded awareness of the Santa Monica beach at Bay Street that was sometimes known as the Inkwell during the era of de facto segregation in California, along with the life story of Nick Gabaldón, L.A.’s first documented surfer of African-American and Mexican-American descent. Jefferson also has an upcoming book, Leisure’s Race, Power and Place in Los Angeles and California Dreams in the Jim Crow Era, to be published by the University of Nebraska Press in late 2019.
A Walk in the Neighborhood
The stretch of Central Avenue that lies south of the 10 Freeway and north of Vernon is in some ways nondescript, like so many others in South Los Angeles marked by older storefronts with hand-painted signs and the occasional street vendor. But a stroll with Jefferson reveals the unseen history of the Jim Crow era and the early civil rights movement in L.A., along with the melding of the old neighborhood with the influx of Latin American immigrants.
It is not merely history to Jefferson: It’s also personal: Her grandfather, Dr. Peter Price Cobbs, was a neighborhood physician for many years before his death in 1960.
“My mother would bring us over here. I was little. I’d be fascinated, thinking, ‘I’m in the old neighborhood,’” Jefferson says.
Besides her long familiarity with the area, Jefferson drew on her extensive previous research and writing on the Black Angeleno experience to create the Central Avenue guide with Groves, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and editor. The pair delved into archive collections, examined census records, perused old photographs, and read articles from the three newspapers that once covered the community, the California Eagle, the Los Angeles Sentinel and the Times. They also drew from books and scholarly articles.
“A special treat of the research process that I enjoyed was visiting the businesses along the avenue and interviewing the owners for the information that was to go into the guidebook,” Jefferson says.
Middle-class Black families flourished in the area around Central Avenue during the first half of the 20th century in what was largely a parallel society to white L.A., where Blacks faced restrictions in the workplace and community. Blacks were even limited by which homes they could buy, Jefferson notes, at least until the system of racially restrictive “covenants” in property deeds was ruled unenforceable under the 14th Amendment in the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court decision Shelley v. Kraemer.
Segregation was not only a feature of the American South; it was also pervasive in L.A. The African American Firefighter Museum at historic Fire Station No. 30 on Central Avenue just north of the 10 Freeway documents the era from 1924 to 1955 when the city’s Black firefighters were allowed to serve only in two segregated fire stations, and promotions were limited.
Even nightlife was affected. Central Avenue became home to the famous jazz club scene dubbed the “Brown Broadway” by the California Eagle newspaper in part because Black musicians and their fans were not welcome at all-white clubs – though whites made forays to Central Avenue to visit famous spots like Club Alabam and Jack’s Basket Room.
At a time when luxury hotels would not serve Blacks, traveling musicians such as Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong stayed at Central Avenue’s Dunbar Hotel, which opened in 1928 under the name Somerville Hotel just in time to host delegates to the first West Coast convention of the NAACP. Other dignitaries also stayed there, including boxer Joe Louis, poet Langston Hughes and future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The Dunbar still stands, with a lovely renovated courtyard, and is now part of a complex for low-income seniors and others.
A Changing Community
By the 1950s, Black families – including Jefferson’s – began to move farther south and west in the city, no longer limited to the old neighborhood. Some businesses and institutions from the earlier era still thrive, among them the Los Angeles Sentinel newspaper, which moved to Crenshaw Boulevard, and Second Baptist Church, a stately Romanesque Revival church that hosted speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Still home to one of the most influential Black congregations in L.A., the church at 24th Street and Griffith Avenue was designed by trailblazing Black architect Paul Revere Williams and is on the National Register of Historic Places, as is his 28th Street YMCA, now housing for special needs adults and former foster youth.
Along with the Angels Walk heritage trail, other efforts to revitalize the neighborhood include the Central Avenue Constituent Services Center, a strikingly contemporary building that is home to the district office of L.A. City Councilman Curren D. Price Jr. Yet the community’s most vibrant indicator of its past, present and perhaps its future might be the neighborhood’s many murals.
On 42nd Place across from the Dunbar Hotel is a mural featuring such important figures as Dodgers star Jackie Robinson, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, longtime legislator Augustus F. “Gus” Hawkins and Nobel Peace Prize winner Ralph J. Bunche, whose boyhood home is on 40thPlace.
Jefferson points out another mural on the side of El Montoso Market at 40th Place that pays tribute to the Latin American immigrants who now make up 75 percent of the neighborhood’s population. A man hauls a basket filled with vegetables and a depiction of a house on his back, and the L.A. skyscrapers are shown as stacks of U.S. currency.
At 41st Street, another shows a black and brown hand clasped together, and above it, the words cultura cura: Culture heals.
A walk, Jefferson knows, can sometimes teach more than a lecture.
How to Become a Circus Performer (and a Doctor)
Photo by Beihua Guo (Pitzer ’21)
Thanks to a childhood fascination with circus activities, Jack Gomberg ’18 found himself, at the tender age of 18, at a crossroads, having to choose between two radically different paths in life. Should he seize a rare opportunity with Cirque de Soleil or keep his love of the circus arts as an avocation while pursuing a more traditional education at Pomona? Put yourself in his shoes…
Jack Gomberg ’18
Neuroscience Major
Grow up in a baseball-centric family in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago—near the Chicago Cubs’ famed ballpark, Wrigley Field—and start playing tee-ball at 3. Discover that you’re “a little above average” as a toddler-athlete, meaning that you can run all the way to first base without falling down.
In kindergarten, attend a hands-on workshop by the nonprofit social-circus group CircEsteem. After failing miserably at juggling scarves, test your sense of balance on a rolling globe—a hard sphere about four feet in diameter—and do so well that the group invites you to join them for practices.
Partly because the workshop was so cool and partly to escape the soccer practice you despise, join CircEsteem’s new after-school program and discover an awe-inspiring new world—a cavernous circus ring where kids up to high-school age are performing all sorts of acrobatics on the ground and in the air.
At first, stay in your comfort zone with your rolling globe. Then slowly branch out to other circus arts, such as trampoline and partner acrobatics. Avoid two things like the plague: juggling and aerial acrobatics. Conquer your dread of juggling at the age of 8, and two years later, overcome your fear of heights on the static trapeze.
See your first Cirque de Soleil—Corteo—at age 12 and realize that the circus can be truly artistic. Then, when world gym wheel champion Wolfgang Bientzle comes to Chicago to create a Team U.S.A. in the sport, catch his eye and fall in love with the gym wheel under his expert tutelage.
Win your first national championship in gym wheel at 14 after telling your mom she didn’t need to stay because the competition was “no big deal.” Go to your first World Championships in Arnsberg, Germany, and make friends from around the world while reaching the finals in all three 18-and-under events, including one fourth-place finish.
Two years later, apply to Cirque du Soleil to spend a week at their training facility in Montreal, Canada, and get invited to serve as a temporary gym wheel coach for the Cirque du Soleil acrobats. Then, when the World Championships come to Chicago, defend your home turf by winning two bronze medals.
While applying for college, also apply to the École de Cirque in Quebec, a feeder school for Cirque du Soleil. Since you know its three-year program is impossibly exclusive, apply for a gap year in its slightly more accessible one-year program. Get accepted to the three-year program instead. Have to choose between a circus life and Pomona. Choose Pomona.
Even before arriving on campus, make arrangements to form a club at The Claremont Colleges because you want to build a community of people with an interest in the circus arts. Name the club 5Circus and serve as its president for three years before, in the name of continuity, letting someone else take over during your senior year.
Major in neuroscience and decide to become a doctor. But since you didn’t take a gap year before college, decide to take one before entering medical school. Win a Fulbright Fellowship to spend the year in Israel, melding your passions for medicine and the circus by studying an innovative paramedical practice known as “medical clowning.”
From Theory to Practice
Professor Nicholas Ball
A rare collaboration between one of the world’s leading biopharmaceutical companies and a chemistry lab at a small liberal arts college began as the result of a chance encounter.
Chemistry major Ariana Tribby ’17 was presenting a poster at the American Chemistry Society (ACS) National Meeting in Philadelphia in 2016 when her research, under the guidance of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Nicholas Ball, caught the attention of Pfizer’s Senior Principal Scientist Dr. Christopher am Ende.
The biopharmaceutical giant was interested in Ball’s lab work using sulfonyl fluorides to make other sulfur-based molecules. Dr. am Ende was particularly interested in Ball’s work with sulfonamides.
Sulfonyl fluorides have been used in biology for decades, are valued for their stability in water and bioactivity and are now emerging as precursors for a myriad of sulfur-based compounds. According to Ball, the stability of sulfonyl fluorides are more attractive over traditional routes using sulfonamides that require reagents that have a short self-life or undesirable side reactions. The key challenge for Pomona-Pfizer collaborative study was to figure out a way to unlock the reactivity of sulfonyl fluorides for the desired reaction.
Sulfonamides are widely prevalent in the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. They represented 15 percent of the top 100 most prescribed drugs, with therapeutic applications against cardiovascular, infectious and neurological diseases in 2016.
This mutual interest between Pfizer and the Ball Lab led to a year-long research partnership to develop a methodology to make sulfonamides from sulfonyl fluorides using calcium salts. Pfizer did the initial work to come up with a sketch for a synthetic route, while Ball’s lab work involved optimizing that synthetic route and testing its versatility. After countless hours in the lab–both at Pfizer and at Pomona–many teleconference calls and more than 100 chemical reactions later, the research team had found an optimal reaction by the end of the summer of 2017.
The study was recently published as an open access article in Organic Letters, one of the most highly-regarded academic journals in organic chemistry. Their work will hopefully translate into more efficient ways to make a diverse array of sulfonamides, key for discovering new drug targets.
The article’s authors include five Pomona students who worked with Ball: Cristian Woroch ’19, Mark Rusznak ’18, Ryan Franzese ’19, Sarah Etuk ’19 and Sabrina Kwan ’20, who are a mixture of chemistry and neuroscience majors. On Pfizer’s side, along with am Ende, the research and article author team includes scientists and medical chemists: Paramita Mukherjee, Matthew Reese, Joseph Tucker, John Humphrey, who work in Pfizer’s Worldwide Research and Development division. Leah Cleary of Ideaya Biosciences was also part of the team.
For Ball, the goal for students in his lab is to learn how to turn theory into practice, to critically work through scientific challenges and to understand and take ownership of their work. With this Pfizer study, Pomona students were able to better understand the applications of pharmaceutical and medicinal chemistry.
“My experience with industry wasn’t until I was on the job market,” says Ball. “I was never exposed to the fantastic science that is occurring at these companies or realized that it was a career possibility. My hope is that this collaboration shows students that there are options for the them with a science degree other than academia.”
Woroch, who was second author in the study, worked closely with both Ball and Pfizer’s am Ende. This project had such an influence on Woroch’s research interests that he is continuing to pursue the topic for his senior thesis, and am Ende will be a second reader for it.
“What I am most excited for is an opportunity to answer questions that have been popping up since the project began,” says Woroch. “Since our collaboration started over a year ago, there has been a clear direction for the research and so when tangentially-related issues arose, I couldn’t address them. Now, I can revisit them and find an entirely new project that is derived from my interests. Dr. am Ende is a very talented scientist and will be a great guide to help me do meaningful and interesting research.”
Woroch adds that the ability to apply science to real world problems is a big part of what drew him to research. “Particularly when projects are challenging or frustrating, having a practical application for your work is a driving force,” he says.
According to ACS data from 2013, 53 percent of chemistry graduates are employed in industry sectors after attending graduate school, while 39 percent go to work in academia.
Besides this research study, Ball, am Ende and Woroch share another commonality: They all received a Beckman Scholarship at some point in their chemistry research careers. The Beckman Foundation provides grants to researchers and nonprofit research institutions in chemistry and life sciences to promote scientific discoveries and to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research.
“I am very excited that our collaboration with Dr. am Ende’s group at Pfizer is continuing,” says Ball. “We already have a follow-up [study] to this recent paper underway. During my first conversation with Dr. am Ende, he stated that we should be working together versus working against each other and I couldn’t agree more! It is even more special that we share the bond of being Beckman Scholars.”
What’s Next?
As a thought experiment, we asked alumni, faculty and staff experts in a wide range of fields to go out on a limb and make some bold predictions about the years to come. Here’s what we learned…
Start reading (What’s Next in Revolutions?)