April 29, 2025
INDIANAPOLIS — A Trine University student presented her senior chemistry research at this year’s Butler Undergraduate Research Conference (URC), held April 11 on the Butler University campus.
Ha My Le, a chemistry major from Houston, Texas, presented her research poster on “Catalytic Oxidation of an Aldehyde.”
Her research showed that the vanadium complex can effectively catalyze the oxidation of various aldehydes (a class of organic compounds) to esters (organic compounds derived from an acid) at different rates.
In addition to Le, Trine University students Aliciajoy Proxmire, a biochemistry major from Hudson, Indiana, and Makenzie Amich, a forensic science major from Thorntown, Indiana, attended the conference, along with faculty members Steve Dulaney, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry, Tony Layson, Ph.D., professor of chemistry, and David Quist, Ph.D., associate professor of chemistry.
Held since 1988, the Butler URC allows undergraduate students from a wide variety of disciplines and universities to present their research. The event, one of the largest interdisciplinary undergraduate research conferences in the country, included talks in the morning sessions and poster presentations in the afternoon session.
Students and faculty from Trine University’s Reiners Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering traveled to the University of Notre Dame for the annual American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Indiana-Kentucky Student Symposium, with two Trine teams finishing in the top three of their respective events.
Four members of the Thunder Aces, Trine University’s bridge club, will compete in the North American Bridge Championships, which will be held July 31-Aug. 2 in Philadelphia.
A team of Trine University chemical engineering seniors is addressing an operational challenge at Steel Dynamics La Farga Copperworks through their senior design project, developing a more efficient soot recovery system tailored to the facility’s expanding needs.