Full Circle
This story originally appeared in the 2006 issue of Vassar Views in celebration of URSI’s 20th anniversary.
The summer of 1993, Joe Tanski ’95 did his first URSI project with chemistry professors Miriam Rossi, Franco Caruso, and Chris Smart, using a single crystal X-ray diffractometer to investigate the chemistry of gold and clarify the role of this heavy metal in the treatment of rheumatoid disease.
Not many schools Vassar’s size have a single crystal X-ray diffractometer, a very sophisticated piece of equipment used to determine the physical structure of compounds. Vassar had one because Miriam Rossi is an X-ray crystallographer, and she wrote the grant that purchased the machine.
Ten years later, when Tanski joined the chemistry faculty at Vassar (2003) and mentored his first URSI students (2004), the diffractometer was on its last legs and, this past year, finally bit the dust. “For my research and Miriam’s, we need it,” said Tanski in a mid-summer interview. “Next week, I’m going to Oklahoma University for six days, because they have an instrument I can use. But it bothers me that I can’t do it here and have my students doing it. We’re going to write a paper on this and publish it, so it would be really nice if they had that experience.”
Well—now they will get to have that experience, because Tanski wrote a grant proposal with Miriam Rossi as co-principal investigator, and by the end of the 2005 URSI program, they received word that the grant had been funded by the National Science Foundation’s major research instrumentation program. Vassar will soon be the proud owner of a state-of-the-art Bruker SMART APEX II single crystal X-ray diffraction system, the first in its class to be installed at an undergraduate institution.
Which just goes to show that chemists get results. And URSI gets results. And mentoring is critically important to developing scientists. And a liberal arts background is useful to scientists if for no other reason than it gives them an edge writing grant proposals. “I had some classes here in the Religion Department and the Philosophy Department, and that’s really where I learned to write,” said Tanski. “I never thought that I would write so much as a professor—not just papers, but grant proposals and recommendations for students. I write all the time.”
Enamored of chemistry since his sophomore year of high school, Tanski came to Vassar in large part because the Chemistry Department made it clear that undergraduate research, either through URSI or independent study, was not just an option but a priority. He began working in Miriam Rossi’s lab second semester sophomore year and then stayed on campus that summer as her URSI fellow. The following summer, under the auspices of URSI but funded by the Council on Undergraduate Research, he traveled to Rome with Rossi and her spouse, Franco Caruso, who holds an appointment at the Italian National Research Institute. Together, they worked on three projects involving the structures of inorganic complexes that showed promise as anti-tumor or anti-arthritic agents. “I stayed right at the compound, where they have a guest house for people like me from overseas,” said Tanski. “I’d get up in the morning and walk across the compound thinking, ‘I’m in Italy, I’m going to work, and I’m actually getting results.’ It was an incredible feeling.”
While he was there, he connected with mentor number two, a professor from the University of Camerino, north of Rome, who invited him to come back and work for him the following summer. “And again, that was productive because we got some good results, and we still collaborate, even though it’s been 10 years. Three or four research publications came out of our work together.”
With three summers of research experience under his belt, Tanski said he was better prepared than most of his peers in the PhD program at Cornell in terms of what they call “hands in the lab,” or making manipulations at your bench. “But I had a lot to learn as far as classes went. That’s why you go to graduate school.”
At Cornell, he experienced a different kind of mentorship. His “boss,” the professor supervising his graduate work, had a reputation for really pushing his students and holding them to a very high standard. “You knew when the boss pulled his chair up to the table and cleared his throat that he was going to ask you something he knew you didn’t know the answer to, and he was going to use a little Socratic method to get out of you whatever he could, and it wasn’t going to be pretty,” said Tanski. “But he really turned us around as chemists. He taught us how to present, he taught us how to write on the blackboard, he made sure we read the literature, he made sure we knew who the other people were in our field at other universities. He was a great mentor, but he was tough. It would not be unusual to find yourself practically crying after one of our Wednesday meetings. I know other people who had group meetings maybe once a year and never spoke with their boss, and when they were finished, they didn’t have nearly the training we had.”
So what kind of mentor does he aspire to be? “More like Miriam. It’s tough to be a good mentor to graduate students and prepare them correctly, but this isn’t graduate school. I always remember that it was very important to Miriam that her students really understood what they were doing, as opposed to just being able to make the manipulation. You want them to understand the chemistry and to make an intellectual contribution, to come up with a new idea or something to try. You get that every once in a while, and when you do, you love it .”
Tanski currently has three research projects under way in his lab and over the last year or so has had about a dozen students working with him, including Andre Dennis ’06, who has done several semesters of independent research with Tanski as well as two URSI summers. Tanski and Dennis are working on a project that has implications for agriculture. Very simply put, they’re trying to find another way to make ammonia, which is used to make fertilizer. Currently, the hydrogen in ammonia (NH3) comes from natural gas, which is both expensive and finite. It’d be very useful if the hydrogen could be derived from a renewable source, such as water or ethanol. But to do that, they have to synthesize a compound that “fixes” nitrogen in the presence of water.
From Kingston, Jamaica, Dennis, like Tanski, got hooked on chemistry in high school. His 10-year plan involved college in the U.S. and then med school, but the plan has changed because Tanski hooked him on research. “Definitely, definitely—it’s a great experience,” said Dennis. “With Joe as a mentor, I can’t really be laid back about anything I’m doing because he’s always on the ball, so I have to be on the ball to keep up. It keeps me motivated. Granted, it’s hard to get good results, but I’m driven to keep going, keep trying.
“Sometimes it gets a little tedious,” admitted Dennis, “and I need to play some squash...get away from Mudd for a couple of days to clear my head. But eventually? I start to miss the lab, and then I’m back here.”