Undergraduate Research Committee
Undergraduate Research Committee
The Undergraduate Research Committee will oversee the college-wide promotion, enhancement, and assessment of undergraduate scholarship, research, and creative inquiry in ways that are supportive of and consistent with the wide variety of forms of undergraduate work in different schools and disciplines across the University.
You may contact us at undergraduateresearch@messiah.edu
Roseann K. Sachs, Chair
Roseann K. Sachs is Assistant Dean of the School of Science, Engineering and Health and Professor of Chemistry. She has been a proponent of undergraduate research since spending two summers doing inorganic chemistry research at Bethel University as an undergraduate student. Since beginning her professional career, Dr. Sachs has involved over 45 students in her organic chemistry laboratory research at Colorado College, the University of Phnom Penh in Cambodia and Messiah University. In all of these cases, the opportunity to do independent research has expanded each student’s problem-solving and critical thinking skills, enabled integrated learning, and helped students discern their future career path. As chair of the undergraduate research committee, she is committed to making such experiences widely available to students at Messiah University.
Sarah Myers
Sarah is a librarian and the institutional repository manager of Mosaic at Murray Library. She says "It's a joy to assist students in their search for knowledge as they locate, evaluate, and effectively use the needed information". With the creation of the institutional repository, she assists students distribute their academic or creative works with a much wider audience, which hopefully leads to greater scholarly dialogue and exchange.
Dr. Anne Reeve
Dr. Anne Reeve is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. She is interested in natural products, medicinal chemistry, and mechanistic enzymology. Her current collaborative project with students focuses on identifying inhibitors of protein tyrosine phosphatase 1B (PTP1B.) Protein tyrosine phosphatases are important enzymes in cell signaling, but designing inhibitors is difficult because the active site is highly conserved across the family of related proteins. PTP1B is a cytosolic PTP that is a negative regulator of insulin signaling and is involved in tumorigenesis, so inhibiting it may be useful for treating diabetes, obesity, and some cancers. Thus, chalcone, flavone, and stilbene natural products and structural analogs have been synthesized and tested as inhibitors of recombinant human PTP1B. Activity assays for synthetic compounds in comparison to selected natural products showed inhibition comparable to or superior to the natural products. Students working on the project are involved in organic synthesis, enzymatic assays, and molecular docking studies.
Duu (Jason) Renn
Duu (Jason) Renn is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 with a Ph.D. in Political Science. His research and teaching are primarily in International Relations with published articles on Peacekeeping, Civil Wars, and International Law. Previously, Dr. Renn taught at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies and also worked for the Army Corps of Engineers.
Amanda Lohss
Amanda Lohss is an Associate Professor of Mathematics in the Department of Computing, Mathematics, and Physics. Her research interests lie in the intersection of probability and combinatorics, and she enjoys advising undergraduate research projects in these areas. Currently, she is working with several students to research properties of staircase tableaux which are mathematical objects connected to a stochastic particle model used in physics, biochemistry, and engineering.
Michael Dolislager
Dr. Michael Dolislager is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Economic Development. He enjoys working with students on their undergraduate research projects and is excited that he was able to advise one recent student on her national award winning research paper.