USD Magazine Fall 2007

AROUND THE PARK

Professors Tammy Dwyer (left) and Debbie Tahmassebi are surrounded by their lab-coat clad students who will benefit from this prestigious award.

UPWARD MOTION T h e D e p a r t m e n t o f C h e m i s t r y a n d B i o c h e m i s t r y r e c e i v e s p r e s t i g i o u s C l a r e B o o t h e L u c e P r o f e s s o r s h i p [ c o v a l e n c e ]

W hen she was in school, “there wasn’t anybody there I aspired to become,” admits Professor Debbie Tahmassebi of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Likewise, her col- league and department chair, Professor Tammy Dwyer, had no female role models in science as an undergraduate. Together, they are actively working to change that state of affairs for their own students. Toward that end, the department was recently award- ed a highly prestigious Clare Boothe Luce Professorship, which will fund a new female professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry for five years, beginning in the fall of 2009. Dwyer and Tahmassebi share a common goal with their col- leagues in the department to increase the national visibility of their strong undergraduate program. The Clare Boothe Luce Program, which promotes the advancement of American women in the sci- ences, engineering and mathemat- ics, is the largest source of private support for women in these fields. Remarkably, the department secured this award upon its first application. What impressed the committee so much was the department’s skyrocketing num- ber of female majors. “Of our current majors, 52 percent are female, and of our 2009 chem- istry graduates, 80 percent are by Carol Cujec

TIM MANTOANI

ment has raised over $3 million and will soon submit a $1 million grant proposal to Research Corp- oration that will benefit all of the science departments at USD. “They’ve been working with us on our five-year plan to consid- er how we can go from being a well-kept secret, to becoming a nationally renowned Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry,” says Dwyer. “It sounds too pie-in- the-sky to say you can have it all, but we’re finding our way to hav- ing it all — for ourselves, for our students, for our institution.”

female,” says Tahmassebi. The committee was also

The award will fund a new tenure-track faculty position in the department, and over five years it will pay for her salary, benefits, research and career development. Funded by a USDmatch to this grant is a new departmental pro- gram called“Bridges to Doctoral Institutions,”which will pay for two female students to do summer work at a major research institution. With this award and other recent grants, the department is on an upward trajectory to increase its visibility nationwide. Since January 2003, the depart-

impressed with the number of female role models in the depart- ment and campus-wide. “Across the university we have a female president, a female provost and a female department chair,” says Tahmassebi. “Students see about half of their chemistry and bio- chemistry professors are women —women who are committed to their families,” adds Dwyer. “So they get a good sense that you can become a professional scien- tist and be active in your family.”

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USD MAGAZINE