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PIRE initiatives
Theresa Windus aspires to promote NSF international research program.
- For someone who was a triple major in mathematics, chemistry and computer science as an undergraduate, Theresa Windus has the "perfect job."
Windus, a professor of chemistry and an associate with the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, specializes in theoretical quantum chemistry - the science to understand and predict the molecular behavior of matter and energy.
She uses all of her majors as the Iowa State principal investigator for a National Science Foundation project funded through the Partnership in International Research and Education program. The goal of PIRE is to introduce undergraduates, graduate students, post-doc fellows and even some high school students to global research and collaboration with international scientists.
The PIRE project is engaged in several initiatives. Graduate research fellowships, seminars and workshops, study abroad research experiences and collaborative research projects are planned.
"We want to give students an idea that science is worldwide," explained Windus. She added that the five-year project will provide research experience for students and that members of underrepresented groups will be recruited.
Several PIRE research collaborations between U.S. scientists and international counterparts exist. Windus and ISU are part of a PIRE group that includes Yale and Texas Tech along with university researchers in Austria, Italy and Spain. Her group is using theoretical and computational chemistry to develop and apply algorithms and software to study the interactions of oxygen with organic compounds.
In the interactions, Windus explained, "chemicals will essentially jump to another energetic surface and the products of the reaction are quite different than what we might expect if it didn't make this surface crossing."
Modeling the reactions is anything but simple, and Windus' collaborators are building a sophisticated cyber infrastructure to do the simulations. Their infrastructure must interface the diverse and computationally intense work of the researchers.
"It's an extremely difficult chemistry to model," she said. "It's going to be very challenging, but it will give us the ability to start looking at reactive surfaces that we couldn't have looked at previously."
The work is basic science, but with some very practical applications, such as protecting space shuttles. When a space shuttle reenters earth's atmosphere, intense temperatures result. The oxygen gets hot and etches the craft's surface.
"We're trying to understand how that etching happens and if there is a way to make materials that etch less," Windus said.
Windus started college with her eyes on becoming a computer scientist. As a freshman at Minot State University in North Dakota, she took a chemistry course because she needed the science credits.
"I really didn't like it," she recalled. "They threw a lot of facts at you really fast and didn't tell you why. I like to know why everything works."
Because of her a high grade in that course, the department chair persuaded her to take another chemistry course. She agreed, basically because she still needed another science course. This time it clicked. "I loved it," she said.
A Ph.D. in chemistry at ISU and post-doctoral work at Northwestern followed. She held a Department of Defense position then worked several years for the Department of Energy. She was moving up in management, but it wasn't the direction she wanted to go. She came to ISU in 2006 for her first academic appointment.
"I decided I wanted to get back to basic research," Windus said. "This position just fits me so perfectly because I get to help graduate students, undergraduates and post-docs grow their careers. And I get to do the science that I love to do."
She recently enjoyed teaching a beginning undergrad chemistry class for 200 non-majors. "It was really fun," she said. "If I can get even one of those students to love science or even like science, that would be an awesome accomplishment."
Theresa Windus
Around LAS
March 10-30, 2008
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