URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2017_Melissa-McCarthy

person who has the interest, ability, and motivation to go into science is able to do so.” Levine is particularly passionate about championing the effort to attract more women to science. She runs several programs, including a science camp every April school vacation for middle school girls, and a Sugar Science Day where high school girls conduct experiments with sugar. Levine came to URI in 2010 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a National Institutes of Health funded postdoctoral fellow for two years. She received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Columbia University. Though her work holds many applications outside academia, mentoring research students is part of her calling. “I could never get talked out of the fact that I could come up with any crazy idea in my head and tomorrow there could be a student in the lab running an experiment I designed to test that idea,” Levine says. “That intellectual freedom is amazing.”

Levine developed safe and effective ways to catalyze organic chemistry reactions to change toxic oil molecules into nontoxic molecules.

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flame-retardant experiment

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