Contact: Sarah Nicholas

STARKVILLE, Miss.—More than a half million dollars from the National Science Foundation will provide Mississippi State University faculty members and research students a new piece of equipment—a high-resolution mass spectrometer—to strengthen research capabilities at the land-grant university and for the entire state.

The $540,737 grant is jointly funded by NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation Program, the Chemistry Research Instrumentation Program, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR).

“A high-resolution mass spectrometer is a critical tool for the characterization of new chemicals that researchers in the chemistry department make for applications, ranging from improving fuels to more efficiently building pharmaceutical drugs. This same tool is also excellent for characterizing biological and environmental samples, including the detection of contaminants in water samples,” said Amanda Patrick, the grant’s principal investigator and an assistant professor of chemistry.

Patrick said 12 research groups on campus have been identified as users of the new instrument. Their projects include those relevant to the production of cleaner fuels, transitioning chemical reactions to more sustainable “green” solvents like water or ethanol, and improving chemistry relevant to pharmaceutical manufacturing, among other applications.

Additionally, the instrument will be used for educational activities, training student researchers and utilized during laboratory courses.

Co-PIs on the grant include chemistry faculty members Xin Cui, Joe Emerson, Vicky Montiel-Palma and Sean Stokes.

A native of North Carolina, Patrick was named a Cottrell Scholar in 2022 and in 2021 received an American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund Doctoral New Investigator Award.

An MSU faculty member since 2018, Patrick received her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Florida and her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from North Carolina State University.

More information about Patrick’s lab and research is available at https://www.chemistry.msstate.edu/people/faculty/amanda-patrick/.

For more details about MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Chemistry, visit www.cas.msstate.edu and www.chemistry.msstate.edu.

Mississippi State University is taking care of what matters. Learn more at www.msstate.edu.