Since the focus of Sacramento State’s faculty generally is teaching, students rarely get an opportunity to do research. However, for junior chemistry major Karen Goodwin, a grant from the National Science Foundation, worth approximately $200,000 has given her the opportunity to get into a lab and get some in valuable hands-on experience.

“I’ve always wanted to teach,” Goodwin said. “I have visions of someday being hired at a junior college and being shown some of their lab equipment, and being able to say that I designed that detector.”

The detector that she is referring to is a new detector for a high performance liquid chromatography device that is being developed on campus by the authors of the grant proposal, Dr. Roy Dixon, an associate professor of chemistry and Dr. Bill DeGraffenreid, an associate professor of physics.

The technique enables scientists to determine the makeup of a substance by dissolving a material and forcing it into a thick, stationary substance. The results of that test can tell scientists about the make up of a chemical compound.

There are actually two detectors that the group is working on, one based on a method called aerosol charge detection, which involves detecting substances based on what kind of electric charge they have, and another that is based on a photo ionization technique, which involves creating charged particles called ions, with light.

“One of my focuses is on atmospheric chemistry. I wanted one of these detectors for my work, but there are some technical issues and some financial issues, and so I thought that I could build my own,” Dixon said.

The grants are very hard to obtain, with only about 10 percent of proposals being funded.

“We realized that together we might be able to put together a more attractive package for a proposal by combining the skills of physicists and chemists,” DeGraffenreid said. “We had the opportunity to speak on a number of occasions about the things that interest us professionally and we really noticed that there was some common ground on our ideas about instrumentation.”

Part of what brought DeGraffenreid to the project is his experience with electronics.

“A lot of chemists don’t have a background in electronics. Dr. Dixon does, but it’s not quite as extensive as mine. He had been playing around with this project, and he felt that I might be able to bring some interesting things to it,” DeGraffenreid said.

A key part of the proposal was the inclusion of undergraduates as research assistants, DeGraffenreid said.

“There is an on-going push in the sciences to develop more research opportunities to undergraduates. It’s so much easier to learn the science when you are doing it than it is when you are working on projects that are destined to succeed,” DeGraffenreid said.

One way to provide more students with the opportunity to do research is to develop more lab programs.

Recently, the physics department at Sac State has developed such a program, a scientific instrumentation certificate that helps students prepare for the challenges of building scientific instruments in a real lab setting.

Goodwin is the first chemistry student to be involved in the program, which while generally aimed at students with a desire to go into industrial physics, has many uses for students.

“I want to go into teaching with a good, solid background,” Goodwin said. “That means being actively involved with all kinds of equipment, and that certificate will really help me get involved in that.”

For students with designs on teaching, there is also an economic aspect as well.

“With budgets what they are now, as a teacher, it would be nice to be able to work on a broken piece of equipment without having to wait for some lab technician,” Goodwin said.