Six Rhodes students recently presented their summer research at the 17th MERCURY conference held at Furman University in Greenville, SC. They are Connor Frost (neuroscience, 2019), Elise Moix (neuroscience, 2020), Madison Perchik (chemistry, 2019), Abby Polzin (urban studies, 2020), Kayla Puzdrakiewicz (2021), and Megan Simons (mathematics and chemistry, 2019).
With Professor of Chemistry Mauricio Cafiero, the group has been working on the design of small molecules with the potential to act as treatments for Parkinson’s disease.
MERCURY is made up of computational chemistry faculty from primarily undergraduate institutions who share high performance computing resources funded by National Science Foundation grants. Cafiero has been a co-principal investigator on the past three grants for $220,000, $200,000, and $225,000. The last grant was used to purchase SKYLIGHT, a 628–core computer shared by students of all the members of the consortium.