Margaret V. Merritt
Professor of Chemistry
Wellesley College
Wellesley MA 02181
Office: Science Center 262
Phone: 781-283-3016
Fax: 781-283-3642
E-mail: mmerritt@wellesley.edu

Professional Experience:
1970-72 Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA
1972-82 Research Chemist and Research Head, Physical and Analytical Chemistry Research, The Upjohn Company, Kalamazoo, MI
1982-date Wellesley College Chemistry Department
1989-90 Visiting Scholar, Harvard School of Public Health
1995-96 Visiting Scholar, Harvard University Department of Chemistry with Professor George M. Whitesides

 
Teaching Interests and Activities: 
I teach courses in introductory (Chemistry 115) and analytical chemistry (Chemistry 261) as well as in the College Writing program (Writing 125). I am particularly interested in developing formal writing exercises
for chemistry courses as a tool to teach the science itself as well as to develop student communication skills. Other curricular interests include the development of laboratory experiments centered around environmental
issues and the chemistry of art. For example, students in analytical chemistry have worked in collaboration in with Curator Melissa Katz of the Davis Museum on an interdisciplinary project in the analysis of pigments in
art objects.

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Research Interests and Activities:  Reactions at Gold Interfaces. One area of current research is the development of alkanethiol-stabilized gold nanoparticles as model surfaces for probing interfacial effects on the reactions of small molecules. These newly discovered materials are formed by reduction of AuCl4- in the presence of alkanethiols; the resultant products resemble the well-characterized planar self-assembling alkanethiolate-Au monolayers. In contrast to monolayers on planar surfaces, the large surface areas of the gold cluster nanoparticles permit the use of the conventional tools of organic chemistry to investigate these structures and the reactions carried out in their presence. Projects in this area include the synthesis and characterization of alkanethiol-stabilized gold cluster nanostructures presenting ionic functional groups as models for ionic micelles as chiral catalysts.

Colloidal Gold-Immobilized Proteases. The inverse process of molecular self-assembly of alkanethiolate monolayers on gold is the self-assembly of gold colloid arrays by immersion of modified glass surfaces in colloidal gold. We are currently evaluating such gold arrays coated with adsorbed proteases for analytical applications. Projects in this area involve the formation and characterization of colloidal gold-proteases arrays and investigations of the use of these two-dimensional arrays in peptide mapping studies.

Current Student Projects:  Kaia Brown, Wellesley '99, has been synthesizing and characterizing w-carboxyl-alkanethiol-stabilized nanoparticles. using infrared and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopies. Other related projects involve the use of capillary electrophoresis to evaluate the acid-base properties of the tethered carboxylic acid and the synthesis and characterization of chiral nanoparticles. Kaia initiated this project during the summer of 1997 as an NSF-REU project and is continuing her work during the current academic year.

Sara Davies, Wellesley '99, worked with Heather Liddle of the University of the Pacific, in the 1997 NSF-REU site program in immobilizing proteases on colloidal gold attached to glass surfaces. Specifically, they were able to attach bovine pancreatic trypsin onto two-dimensional Au colloidal monolayers on glass and show that it was active in standard spectrophotometric assays for protease activity. Elizabeth Boyer, Wellesley '98 is continuing this project as a Chemistry 350 in the Spring Semester of 1998.

	Sara and Heather activated the glass slides by treating them with a silane, and then dipped the activated plates into colloidal gold to immobilize it. Trypsin was then attached to the gold arrays as sketched below.
Sara Davies		Heather Liddle

Other student projects are available in the areas of separations (development of methods for analysis of the ions of Lake Waban and protein protein mapping), synthesis of other nanoparticles, kinetics, and construction of simple spectrophotometers and flow injection analysis equipment.

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1998-99 research interests and projects

 
Links to Course Pages and Other Helpful Sources

Chemistry 115-02, Spring 1998
Statistics Package 
Interactive Spreadsheets 
Chemistry Department Home Page  

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• Margaret V. Merritt mmerritt@wellesley.edu 
• Dept. of Chemistry 
• Date Created:January 22, 1998 
• Last Modified: January 26, 1998 
• Expires: Aug 1, 2000