Dr. Michelle Bunagan, a new member of the Chemistry Department, has been named one of eight recipients of a Camille and Henry Dreyfus Faculty Start-up Award. This unrestricted five-year grant provides $30,000 assistance in the initiation of her research program at TCNJ. She is one of only five faculty from a public institution in the past five years to receive this start-up award. This program is very competitive and further confirms the stature of both the Chemistry Department and the School of Science nationally and will allow her to hire undergraduate research students to study with her.
Her research centers on the field of protein dynamics, relevant to protein folding and protein-ligand and oligomerization reactions. Bunagan first became interested in spectroscopy as an undergraduate while at Douglass College at Rutgers University where she received her B.A. While at Rutgers, her undergraduate research efforts resulted in two publications. She then went on to the University of Pennsylvania where her Ph.D. work focused on the use of pump-probe laser techniques to understand protein folding mechanisms.
The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation supports the scholarly activity of new faculty in chemistry at primarily undergraduate institutions with the award intended to initiate and facilitate their independent research programs.
This Dreyfus award program is open to academic institutions in the states, districts, and territories of the United States that grant a bachelor’s or master’s degree, but not a doctoral degree in the chemical sciences, including biochemistry, materials chemistry, and chemical engineering.