Grad student wins elite award

Jason Schmink, a PhD candidate in chemistry, is one of 13 students in the country and the first from UConn to win the American Chemical Society’s Division of Organic Chemistry fellowship, which was established in 1981.

Schmink’s research uses microwaves in organic synthesis, a relatively new area of chemistry that also is the research focus of his adviser, assistant professor Nicholas Leadbeater.

Using the microwave, he is developing new ways to make molecules and establishing methods to scale these reactions up and monitor them.

Schmink also won the 2008-2009 Institute for Teaching and Learning’s Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award.

The ACS fellowship award was based on his research record and on a review paper that he wrote that discusses the use of gold catalysis to make molecules selectively. He will present a poster about his research at the National Organic Symposium at Princeton University in June 2011.