Rachel Narehood Austin, a member of the chemistry faculty at Bates, has received two grants totaling $210,000 to support her research into the oxidation of hydrocarbons in the environment.

Austin was awarded a $60,000 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in December. This month, she received an academic research enhancement award of $150,000 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Austin is investigating the molecular mechanisms through which hydrocarbons, a category of compounds that includes fossil fuels, combine with oxygen. Hydrocarbons occur in the environment both naturally and as the result of human activity. Burning is an obvious means of oxiding such compounds, but Austin is concerned with more controlled and precise reactions, such as those performed by certain bacteria.

“There’s a longstanding interest in figuring out ways of using molecular oxygen to selectively oxidize hydrocarbons,” says Austin. “Nature can do it, but chemists really struggle to accomplish it. Our detailed studies of the enzymes that nature uses may provide insight into how to design synthetic systems to do the same kind of chemistry.”

The grants will defray the costs of travel to other research facilities, supplies and compensation for Austin’s partners in research, including Bates students and a two-year post-doctoral fellow. Also, the Bates chemistry department will receive $5,000 of the Dreyfus grant to support undergraduate research.

Austin is focusing on a type of bacterial enzyme, the so-called diiron enzyme, involved in hydrocarbon oxidation. “I’ve done all I can with studying the enzyme in whole cells,” she says. “To answer my remaining questions, I have to purify the enzyme, at least partially.”

Such purification “is notoriously difficult,” she says. “But I’m convinced it’s an important problem to tackle.”

Understanding the natural transformation of hydrocarbons, Austin explains, “might be useful for people interested in speeding up the natural transformation of hydrocarbons — as in bioremediation — or for people interested in how natural processes may change as climate and other environmental factors change.”

She adds, “I hope that I can serve as an example to other chemists to show how rewarding it is to work on complex environmental problems.”

Austin teaches inorganic chemistry and general chemistry and is a member of the Bates environmental studies program. She came to Bates in 1995 after completing a Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received a B.A. in chemistry and dance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1990.

Established in 1993, the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards support and encourage young scholars who have demonstrated excellence in research and teaching, and significant achievements in scholarly research with undergraduates. Bates was one of nine institutions to receive a 2004 Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Program grant.

Austin is the second member of the Bates chemistry faculty to receive the Henry Dreyfus award. The first was professor T. Glen Lawson, in 1995. In addition, another member of the department, professor Thomas Wenzel, won a Dreyfus Foundation grant totaling $105,000 in 2003 to support a departmental teaching and research fellow.

On behalf of the chemistry department, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry Thomas Wenzel has received a two-year grant totaling more than $100,000 to support a teaching and research fellow at Bates.

The grant was awarded by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, New York City. The foundation will award $55,000 for the Dreyfus Fellow’s first year and $50,000 for the second. The foundation’s Scholar/Fellow Program for Undergraduate Institutions aims to give recent recipients of a doctoral degree a head start on their academic teaching careers.

“A lot of people don’t appreciate, when they come to a place like Bates, how to balance their activities between teaching and scholarly work,” Wenzel explains. Finding that balance can be a struggle. “This program is designed to provide first-hand experience with how to balance both and how to succeed at doing both,” he says, “with, in a sense, very little at stake, because you’re not in a tenure-track position.”

The search for the Dreyfus Fellow began this month. Starting at Bates this autumn, the fellow will assist Wenzel with both his teaching and his research, which explores processes for determining the molecular orientation of certain compounds that can exist in either “right-handed” and “left-handed” forms, with dramatically different properties in some cases.

Wenzel says the Dreyfus program benefits everyone involved. As noted above, the award will improve the chances of some young academic making it through those challenging early years. “I clearly have a concern about wanting to see people who are considering a career as a faculty member at an undergraduate institution flourish in that career,” Wenzel says. “That’s really the most positive aspect of the program, and what interested me most in it.”

The program will enable Wenzel himself to gain ground on his research, thanks to the fellow’s participation in both the lab and the classroom, because a reduced teaching load will afford Wenzel more research time. The college and the chemistry department will benefit from the fresh perspective, energy and ideas of a newly minted Ph.D.

Most important, Wenzel’s research students will benefit from the Dreyfus Fellow’s mentoring. “This person, just having finished graduate school, will be able to talk with those students about what graduate school is really like and what kinds of career opportunities exist,” Wenzel says.

Wenzel, whose teaching methods and research results have won him a variety of honors, received his first Dreyfus Scholar/Fellow award in 1990. Only six of the Dreyfus grants are awarded annually. “It’s something of an honor to get it,” he says.

Check out the chemistry department’s website here.