Spring 2026 Newsletter

Message from the Chair

This past year has been a reminder that chemistry is not just a scientific endeavor, but a global community built on curiosity, perseverance, and collaboration. From early mornings in the lab to evening advising and study sessions, the work happening across our department reflects a collective commitment to innovation, achievement, and supporting one another along the way.

In this annual newsletter, we celebrate the many milestones that define our year. We recognize our graduating students, whose dedication and growth have prepared them for the next steps in their academic and professional journeys. We also welcome new faculty and staff, whose expertise and fresh perspectives strengthen our teaching and research mission.

You will find highlights of conferences where our members presented their work and engaged with the broader scientific community, as well as a range of awards and honors earned by both students and faculty. These accomplishments speak not only to individual excellence, but also to the collaborative environment that makes such success possible.

While this newsletter captures many of our achievements, it cannot fully convey the daily effort, mentorship, and teamwork that sustain them. As we look ahead, we remain committed to fostering an inclusive and dynamic space where inquiry thrives and future discoveries take shape.

Thank you for being part of our community and for supporting the work that continues to define our department.

New Faculty and Staff

Elizabeth Ryland, Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Originally from the land of Cajun food, jazz, and Mardi Gras (Louisiana), Liz earned her BS in Chemistry from Louisiana Tech University and then moved around the US working on cool experiments. She earned her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she worked with Josh Vura-Weis to build a tabletop high-harmonic generation extreme-ultraviolet x-ray lightsource and studied femtosecond photophysics in small organometallic molecules. She endured the pandemic as a National Research Council postdoc at the Naval Research Lab in DC, where she dabbled in 2DIR spectroscopy, existential crises, and polaritonic physics. Desperately missing x-rays, Liz moved to California for a postdoc at the Stanford-affiliated SLAC National Accelerator Lab, where she performed experiments using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and worked with Amy Cordones-Hahn on femtosecond Nitrogen K-edge spectroscopy and understanding donor-bridge-acceptor photocatalysts. She loves learning new things and thus has 1000 hobbies. Right now, mostly: music, food, reading, writing, arts and crafts, pottery, martial arts, hiking, and learning new things.

Amy Struppa, Program Coordinator

Amy moved to Bellingham from Redondo Beach, California more than two decades ago. Drawn by the area’s natural beauty and strong sense of community, she made Bellingham her home and later became a first-generation, nontraditional student at Western Washington University. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in Multidisciplinary Studies with an emphasis in Media and Culture. In November 2025, Amy transferred to the Chemistry Department from the Child Development Center. In her role as Program Coordinator, she supports students, faculty, and departmental operations. Amy enjoys arts and culture, local events, and spending time with her Goldendoodle, Bootsie.

Department Highlights from WWU News

The following are links to WWU News articles from the past year highlighting members of our department.

More Department Accomplishments

In addition to the stories linked above, our students, alumni, and faculty have done many other impressive things in the past year, including:

• Many Western students and faculty presented their research at national and regional conferences this year. Here is a photo of the WWU contingent at the 2025 Murdock conference in Vancouver, WA.
• Four students (Gabriel Black, Olivia Caldwell, Anders Johnson, and Alana Sullivan) who majored and/or did research in our department were awarded 2026 Graduate Research Fellowships from the National Science Foundation. These fellowships are highly competitive, so having four in one year is cause for celebration.
• Department alum Kira Podolsky (BS Biochemistry '14, currently a postdoc at MIT) has done all sorts of cool things since graduating from WWU. See this nice feature on her current research and her accomplishments as a 2023 Schmidt Science Fellow.
• Prof. Lauren Dudley (who has already been doing great work in our department since 2023) will be promoted to Assistant Professor of Chemistry Education starting in the fall of 2026.
• Prof. Jeanine Amacher received WWU's 2026 Arlan Norman Award for Excellence in Student Mentoring.
• Prof. Sierra Cullati was awarded an R15 Research Enhancement Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the project titled "Regulation of CK1 substrate specificity during DNA repair". CK1 kinases are key signaling hubs that respond to a variety of upstream inputs and then act on downstream substrates in a broad range of pathways, many of which are misregulated in human diseases such as cancer. Elucidating the mechanisms by which CK1 activity and substrate specificity is controlled is therefore critical to understanding cellular signaling networks and to developing new therapeutic interventions. Prof. Cullati's research will use a combination of biochemistry and cell biology to determine how autophosphorylation regulates CK1 in the fundamental process of DNA repair.
• Prof. Tim Kowalczyk was awarded a 2026 BRIDGE Fellowship by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). It provides a funded opportunity to return to Japan to strengthen existing collaborations, form new ones, and advance Japan-overseas scientific exchange. Prof. Kowalczyk will visit collaborators at the University of Tokyo for three weeks in the summer of 2026.

Publications

WWU undergraduate students (*), WWU graduate students (†)

*Cox-Tigre, N; *Stewart, ME; *Tucker, J; †Walkenhauer, EG; †Wilce, CS; Antos, JM; Amacher, JF. "Amino acid variants at the P94 position in Staphylococcus aureus class a sortase modulate substrate binding and enzyme activity". Biochemistry 2026, 65, 1325-1339.

Amacher, JF; Cushing, PR; Vouilleme, L; Cullati, SN; Deng, B; Gerber, SA; Boisguerin, P; Madden, DR. "Sequence engineering at non-motif modulator residues yields a peptide that effectively targets a single PDZ protein in a disease-relevant cellular context". J. Mol. Biol. 2026, 438, 169597.

†Avery, NG; *Tahti, EF; Spiegel, PC; Antos, JM; McCarty, J; Amacher, JF. "A putative interaction between the transmembrane domains of Streptococcus pyogenes sortase A and its endogenous substrate M protein revealed by molecular dynamics simulations". J. Phys. Chem. B 2025, 129, 13117-13127.

†Hamlett, T; Wang, X; *Poellot, J; *Doebler, JE; Hashemi, S; Li, X; Bao, Y. "Asymmetric silica-gold nano/microparticles: Eccentric, Janus, tadpole structures, and their applications". ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2026, 18, 23815-23826.

*Kerns, ME; *Guo, A; *Wee, W; †Talbott, A; *Downer, MJ; †Hamlett, T; †Talusig, JM; *Losey, CS; Murphy, AR; Bao, Y. "Fabrication of biocompatible plasmonic sensing platforms via direct growth of metal nanomaterials on modified silk films". Nanoscale 2026, 18, 8578-8588.

*Flanagin, G; Berger, RF. "Rationalizing patterns in the cation ordering, geometric distortion, and electronic properties of a class of I-V-VI₂ chalcogenide semiconductors". J. Phys. Chem. C 2026, 130, 1125-1131.

Boudreaux, A; Borda, E; *Mureno, B; *McKenzie, E; *Hughes, A; *Welker, A; *Stredicke, L; Haskell, T. "Qualitative investigation of students' cross-disciplinary understanding of energy concepts". Phys. Rev. Phys. Educ. Res. 2026, 22, 010112.

*Jansen, CDR; McPhee-Shaw, E; *Loughren, J; *Yamamura, A; *Crosland, J; Harrison, A; Flower, A; de Bruyn, W; Clark, CD. "Assessing riverine inputs vs. in situ production as sources of chromophoric dissolved organic matter in Bellingham Bay in the Salish Sea". Aquat. Sci. 2026, 88, 27.

Akizuki, K; Cullati, SN; Johnson, AE; Chen, J-S; Willet, AH; Gould, KL. "The mitotic functions of a fission yeast CK1 enzyme are regulated by Cdk1-dependent and auto-phosphorylation". J. Biol. Chem. 2026, 302, 111007.

Dudley, L; Sadler, P; Alters, B. "Understanding the relationship between organic chemistry misconceptions and students’ chemistry self-efficacy in higher education organic chemistry courses". J. Chem. Educ. 2026, 103, 1935-1942.

Dudley, L. "Perceptions of student success in post-secondary chemistry courses". Am. J. Qualitative Res. 2026, 10, 109-122.

Huang, J; Kowalczyk, T; Nishimoto, Y; Yokogawa, D. "A restriction-based configuration interaction approach based on LC-DFTB: An efficient method for field-induced charge transfer in molecular systems". J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2025, 21, 12592-12600.

Hourahine, B et al., including †Deshaye, MY; Kowalczyk, T. "Recent developments in DFTB+, a software package for efficient atomistic quantum mechanical simulations". J. Phys. Chem. A 2025, 129, 5373-5390.

James, BD et al., including Lemkau, KL. "Long-range transport of oil by marine plastic debris: Evidence from an 8500 km journey". Environ. Sci. Technol. 2026, 60, 2649-2661.

Radovic, JR et al., including Lemkau, KL. "The black tears of USS Arizona: Forensic assessment of residual oil from the Pearl Harbor shipwreck". Mar. Pollut. Bull. 2026, 222, 118674.

†Croney, KA; *Huisman, C; *Brock, R; †Whitham, KM; Amacher, JF; McCarty, J. "Conformational free energy landscape of sorting signal peptides in complex with bacterial sortases". Biophys. J. 2026, in press.

†Hekker, KF; †Jones, AP; Murphy, AR; Mikkelsen, K; O'Neil, GW. "New adapters for safe handling of sensitive reagents". ACS Chem. Health Saf. 2026, in press.

*Wier, KE; *Conner, SM; Berger, RF; O'Neil, GW. "Examining the silicon‑fluorine gauche effect in 3-fluoro silacyclohexanes". Tetrahedron Lett. 2026, 174, 155902.

*Billmire, TQ; †Jones, AP; *Maffett, SM; Berger, RF; Gervais, C; Kaminsky, W; O'Neil, GW. "Synthesis of oxasilolanes by TBAT-catalyzed hydroxyl-directed hydrosilylation". J. Org. Chem. 2025, 90, 12334-12345.

*Nunley, BT; *Petrich, BJ; *McGraw, RJ; *Schuldheiss, PD; *Cooper, GB; Bao, Y; Scheuermann, ML. "Continuous centrifugation and filtration for assessing the catalytic significance of metal nanoparticles forming in situ during the palladium-catalyzed arylation of N-methylindole". Catal. Sci. Technol. 2025, 15, 6785-6791.

Belofsky, G; O'Brien, C; Cordova-Gamez, R; Ragland, N; Hurd, L; Spiegel, PC; Heer, C; Salomon, CE. "Antimicrobial activities of new and known flavanoid metabolites of Dalea lanata var. terminalis (Fabaceae)". Fitoterapia 2026, 191, 107224.

Belofsky, G; Hansen, N; Heer, C; Spiegel, PC; Salomon, CE. "Antimicrobial flavanones and other metabolites of Dalea albiflora". Phytochem. Lett. 2025, 69, 103018.

Stephenson, NS; Dahlberg, CL; Huynh, T; Duffy, E; †Hunter, K; *Spring, L; *Worline, E; *Weaver, J; *Bolland, K. "Science practices in the general chemistry laboratory: Hits, misses, and near misses". Chem. Educ. Res. Pract. 2026, 27, 576-590.