UA Doctoral Student to Meet With Nobel Laureates

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. ‚ Imagine spending a week in Europe interacting with the world’s top minds in your field of study.

That’s the kind of scientist’s “dream vacation,” University of Alabama doctoral student Ann Visser will experience in June when she travels to Lindau, Germany, to attend lectures and meetings with some 66 Nobel Prize winners in the fields of chemistry, physics, physiology and medicine.

Visser, who is working toward a Ph.D. in chemistry at UA, has been selected as one of 36 students sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy to attend the 50th anniversary meeting of Nobel laureates June 26-30.

The DOE-sponsored students will join graduate students from around the world at the meeting where they will spend mornings listening to lectures by the world-renowned scientists and afternoons interacting with them in small group settings.

“I hope to meet as many of the Nobel Prize winners as possible,” said Visser, who turned down an opportunity to present her own research at a chemistry conference in Washington, D.C., because it conflicted with the dates of the Nobel meeting.

The students sponsored by the DOE represent 36 different universities and research facilities including such prestigious institutions as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Princeton, Tulane, the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Chicago. The DOE restricted institutions nationwide to one nominee each in the competitive program. All the students are in their second or third year of graduate work and are currently part of scientific teams doing research with funding from the DOE.

Visser’s research, conducted through UA’s Center for Green Manufacturing, focuses on the development of room temperature ionic liquids as alternatives to organic solvents. These liquids may some day serve as environmentally friendly solvents for use in a wide variety of industrial applications. The research, under the direction of Dr. Robin Rogers, professor of chemistry and director of the Center for Green Manufacturing, is funded by grants through the DOE’s Basic Energy Science division.

Rogers recruited Visser to UA’s doctoral program from an undergraduate internship at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago. A native of Zeeland, Mich., she is a graduate of Grand Valley State College in Michigan.