Seton Hill students have many unique opportunities available in how they spend their breaks between classes.

In recent years, science majors have spent their summers gaining hands-on research experience at major universities, capitalizing on the skills they learned in labs on the Hill and applying them to real-world problems across the nation. 

Many of these research experiences were funded through the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) along with other similar university-specific programs, which allow students who attend smaller schools to gain access to larger labs and spend time with top researchers in their chosen fields. In the last several years, a number of Seton Hill students have been selected for these nationally competitive opportunities, which focus particularly on students who are first-generation or minorities.

The REU program provides students with an opportunity to spend 10 weeks on a research team, typically at R1 institutions. Selected students are also given a stipend that includes housing and transportation to and from the location.

Seton Hill’s Fit for the World Career Readiness Program requires all undergraduate students to engage in an experiential learning opportunity before they graduate. In the sciences, that opportunity must include a research project or internship completed on or off campus. 

Associate Professor of Chemistry Dr. Jon Moerdyk encourages Seton Hill students to pursue research opportunities – at Seton Hill or beyond – and is a proponent of the REU program. He started an annual open presentation walking students through the process and encourages anyone with an interest in research to apply. Students generally apply for several REUs that could fit their interests and are sometimes accepted into multiple opportunities. 

“It’s a great learning environment where they gain invaluable experience in research,” Moerdyk said. “We’ve had a good number of participants for a university of Seton Hill’s size. Our students do well – we’ve had very positive feedback in assessments.” 

Five Seton Hill students completed research experiences at other schools during the summer of 2022. Seniors Dominick Cicala and Mitchell Zembower completed REUs this summer at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania while juniors Elizabeth Colecchia and Shaney Enck completed REUs at Kent State University and the University of Central Florida. Junior Lauren Dellett took part in the Summer Undergraduate Research Program (SURP) at the University of Pittsburgh.

Mitch Zembower

Senior Mitch Zembower was accepted to three REU programs and selected the University of Pennsylvania so he could gain experience conducting research at an Ivy League school, live in a city, and explore a new area of chemistry outside of his comfort zone, while not going too far from his hometown of Bedford, Pa.

“My professors at Seton Hill aided me throughout the process. The Ruth O’Block Grant Scholar program was another factor as my Grant Scholar Mentor, alumna Susan Mercer, helped me a lot with getting my resume, cover letter, and personal statement together,” Zembower said. 

The project he was working on involved synthetic modeling of a rare-earth-containing enzyme which scientists found in nature. The enzyme has the potential to break down methanol that could be used for biomass or to create renewable energy. Mitch was the third person in the scientific community to work on the project, with his mentor at Penn teaching him as she had been taught. 

He found his relationship with the fifth-year graduate student very valuable. 

“She always asked me ʻwhy?’ – before I’d do anything she made me sit down and think,” he said. “I gained that insight of why am I doing this?’” 

Mitch’s Penn mentor also commented on how much he had grown after the 10 weeks they worked together, and he received positive feedback from the other people in the lab about his readiness and presentation skills. 

“Once I got there I realized how much Seton Hill has prepared me and that I was here for a reason. We have good labs and nice equipment, but I think having small classes – and a good relationship with our professors that some bigger schools might not have – has helped me to become a better student and a better chemist,” he said. “I went to Penn and I realized that what I learned at Seton Hill is what they are learning there. It gave me a lot

of confidence.”

Mitch’s plans for the future include applying to Ph.D. programs, with an interest in green chemistry. While he would currently like to work in the plastics or pharmaceuticals industry, he is keeping an open mind, letting his experiences direct him as he gets further into the field and discovers new possibilities. 

Mitch’s Grant Scholar Mentor – Susan Mercer, Ph.D. – pursued a research opportunity herself when she was a Seton Hill undergraduate and the two found a connection in both being first-generation college students. 

Mercer, who graduated from Seton Hill in 2004, worked at Bayer during the summer of 2001. The following summer she had an opportunity to return to Bayer, but instead – knowing that she might want to pursue a Ph.D. further down the road – pursued a summer research experience at Case Western to see what the experience could be like. 

“It’s a totally different ballgame when you go to these really large research-intensive institutions,” she said. “You appreciate what you get from Seton Hill in that you really have a solid education and it gives you that confidence boost, but it’s also important to see what that big research machine looks like. The scale of everything is so much different. You learn a totally different set of skills.”

Mercer has found valuable mentors to help guide her career and wanted to pay it forward by providing the same kind of support to others. She worked in academia for 13 years and today works in the pharmaceutical industry.

Shaney Enck

Shaney Enck found out about the REU program from a previous participant – Allison Pittman ’21 – who completed an REU at Sanford Research Center, S.D., in 2021 and is currently working as a lab technician at Duke University. Alli and Dr. Moerdyk helped mentor Shaney through the application process, with Dr. Moerdyk encouraging her to not limit herself in location when choosing where to study.

As a Biology 4+4 student in the Early Admissions Program with Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, Shaney plans to attend LECOM Bradenton in Florida and wanted to start building her connections within the medical and research fields. Being accepted into an REU at the University of Central Florida was another way to further her education.

“It was a big step of independence for me to go away to Florida for three months,” she said. “I’d never been away from home for that long. Additionally, it was the farthest I have ever traveled with respect to my education.”

Shaney has known that she wanted to be a doctor since she was 13 years old when her mother was diagnosed with Stage 4 BRCA 1 breast cancer and had a very slim chance of survival. Just she and her mother were running their farm, and she was afraid of ending up in the foster system.

“What gave me hope was getting to sit down with her oncologist, her surgeon, and all of her other physicians. They would tell me step-by-step what the plan was and how they were going to help her overcome this battle,” she said. “After two years of chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and a radical hysterectomy my mother is in remission. It was an amazing experience and it drove me to want to help people in similar situations.”

In Florida Shaney quickly made friends with her roommates – other REU participants who came to the program from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Pensacola, Fla. – and dove into the research. Working with principal investigator Dr. William T. Self and Ph.D. candidate Michael A. Johnstone, Shaney helped investigate the antimicrobial properties of silver doped cerium oxide nanoparticles (AgCNPs). These nanoparticles were applied in the clinical setting to combat clostridioides difficile, a bacterium that causes diarrhea and pseudomembranous colitis in roughly 500,000 patients and is responsible for approximately 29,000 deaths in the United States each year.

“I was so nervous when I got down there. The whole lab was microbiology and I’d never taken microbiology, but the whole reason I was there was to learn,” she said. “It was so inspiring and interesting to hear what the other students were doing and knowing how many people are making a difference in the world when it comes to research.”

“At first it was hard for me to gain confidence because a lot of things were going wrong and I was thinking research isn’t for me. I went through a lot of trial and error,” she said. “I think it makes you a better person because you have to learn to be very patient. You cannot rush the process and you have to learn to ask questions.”

Meeting others in her cohort encouraged Shaney on her path and they reinforced that she should strive to get the most out of her undergraduate years.

“I think it helped me approach my education differently this semester, asking why and how things happen,” Shaney said.

Mitch, Shaney, Dominick, Elizabeth and Lauren join the nearly 20 others who have participated in these types of experiences during their undergraduate years at Seton Hill since 2011.

Their forays into research have ripple effects long after these students returned to Seton Hill. A high percentage of these students have found homes in the lab well beyond their time on the Hill, with many currently pursuing Ph.D. programs across the country. 

Rachael Ditzler

Rachael Ditzler ’19 knew that she wanted to pursue a career in science from a young age.

“I’ve wanted to be a scientist since I was three or four years old. It’s something that was heavily influenced by my family,” she said. “I really like the inquisitive nature of chemistry and science and its ability to impact the real world.”

Rachael’s grandfather worked in physics and engineering for most of his life and came out of retirement to teach university-level classes. Most of the uncles on her mom’s side of the family are in chemistry, including one who works at the NSF. Her grandfather is also the one who found Seton Hill during Rachael’s college search. She knew that research and a Ph.D. would likely be part of her future and felt that Seton Hill could provide her with a strong foundation in chemistry. 

While having an uncle at the NSF made Rachael aware of potential opportunities early on, she credits Seton Hill – and especially her chemistry advisor Dr. Moerdyk – with taking the idea of pursuing research and making it into a reality. 

Her first REU was at Penn State University in the summer of 2017 working on emulsion chemistry where she realized she loved the pursuit of knowledge and information that comes from doing research. Her second REU in 2018 took her further from home to the University of Southern Mississippi and gave her an appreciation for polymers, which she had been introduced to in organic chemistry. Her project there involved a computational polymer physics project and she came to appreciate the complexity of the polymers over smaller molecules.

“I really enjoyed being able to formulate my own ideas, apply them and get results – whether they were positive or negative – and see the progress that I was able to make in learning new science and applying what I already knew from classes to this new area of science,” Rachael said.

Rachael is currently a fourth-year chemistry Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. She has completed the classes in her program and is conducting research full-time, studying the use of sigmatropic rearrangements, a class of organic chemistry reactions, in synthetic polymers. 

“I’m really excited to have an impact on the scientific community and through the work that I’m doing. Hopefully that can be applied further down the line to having an impact in society, especially with my work on plastics and upcycling and reducing plastic pollution,” Rachael said. “It keeps you motivated seeing how you can make these small discoveries and they accumulate into something bigger than can have a significant impact on scientific research and the world overall.”

She earned additional funding from the NSF as a Graduate Research Fellow, which covers tuition, fees and a stipend for three years. 

Brittney Racioppo ’19 – who also completed two research experiences during her time at Seton Hill – is also in the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) and is currently a Ph.D. student working on biomedical research in The Adibekian Lab at The Scripps Research Institute at the University of Florida.

This article was featured in the Fall/Winter 2022 of Seton Hill's Forward Magazine.