Langhorne Native Alexandra Massa Earns Summer Research Award

EASTON, MA (04/10/2012)(readMedia)-- Langhorne native Alexandra Massa will be one of 50 students from Stonehill College working with faculty members at the College this summer on research projects through the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. The SURE Program provides students with an opportunity to perform significant, publishable research under the guidance of an experienced faculty researcher.

Massa, a sophomore at Stonehill, along with six other students, will work with Louis Liotta, professor and chair of Chemistry, on assorted synthesis projects.

During past summers, Professor Liotta's groups have developed a process for efficiently converting commercially-available sugars into iminosugars. Now, the project is ready to proceed to the synthesis of specific compounds which, as indicated by computer modeling, have the potential of having high biologic activities. Each student will be adapting the previously developed procedure as necessary to synthesize these specific compounds. The students will be encouraged to present their findings at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society. In addition, their final reports will serve as a starting point for a future article submission to the Journal of Organic Chemistry.

The scholars and their faculty mentors are the 17th group to work under the Stonehill Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) program. SURE Scholars will engage in weekly meetings to discuss the progress of their projects and other topics of general interest, and will be paid a stipend for their full-time service. All SURE Scholars will present summaries of their summer's work at an all-campus poster session in the early fall.

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