Jennifer Heemstra was one of 14 graduate students receiving an ACS Division of Organic Chemistry Graduate Fellowship this year. The fellowship stipend this year is $20,000, and the Fellows will travel to the 2005 National Organic Symposium to present a poster on their work. Each of the fellowships is sponsored by a prominent company or organization. Awardees are selected by an independent committee, and evidence of research accomplishments is an important factor in the selection. The applicants for the fellowship submit a short original essay as part of the competition, and the essays of the award winners are available on the Division of Organic Chemistry web site (http://organicdivision.org/fellowship_awardee_bios_04.html).
Below is the biographical information for Ms. Heemstra that is found in Organic Letters, Vol. 6, No. 25, 2004:
Jennifer Heemstra
Jennifer M. Heemstra
Sponsor: Nelson J. Leonard ACS DOC Fellowship, sponsored by Organic Syntheses, Inc.
University: UniVersity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Advisor: Jeffrey S. Moore
Essay: DNA-Templated Chemical Reactions.
Jennifer M. Heemstra received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of California at Irvine, Irvine, CA. She is currently a fourth year graduate student in the laboratory of Professor Jeffrey S. Moore of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL. Jennifer's research focuses on using m-phenyleneethynylene oligomers as synthetic enzyme mimics. She has utilized hydrogen bonding to template folding and shown that folding promotes the methylation of DMAP-functionalized oligomers. She has also shown that methylation can enhance folding stability through pyridinium- interactions. She has also studied the kinetics of this process and devised a novel indicator for measuring pKa values in acetonitrile.
Jennifer Heemstra has been the recipient of other awards during her graduate career.
Drickamer Research Fellowship, 2003-2004
Iota Sigma Pi Anna Louise Hoffman Award, 2004