Researchers in psychology and educational psychology have concluded that students' beliefs can affect their academic performance when facing challenging work. Students’ mindsets (also called “implicit theories of intelligence”) have significant implications for their responses to challenges, confusion, and moments of indecision. Mindset is known to be highly context-dependent and research has shown that students with differing mindsets (incremental vs. entity) define ability and effort differently. Our research investigates how the mindsets and beliefs about effort, ability, and success among first year general chemisry students in the context of the undergraduate general chemistry laboratory. Little evidence currently exists to demonstrate that students experience meaningful learning in the laboratory. We have conducted in-lab observations and semi-structured interviews with general chemistry students in which they were asked to describe their experiences and explain their decision-making processes in the laboratory. Students were sampled based on results from a published 4-item instrument used to generally characterize students’ mindset that was modified to reflect the context of the undergraduate chemistry laboratory. We both inductively and deductively coding data from the interviews to inform the creation of a chemistry-specific assessment tool to characterize students’ mindset and learning in the laboratory. Data was collected with the Intelligence Mindset in the Chemistry Laboratory instrument in both virtual and hybrid  general chemistry II laboratories.

In collaboration with the Crowder group and the Tierney group, this research investigated FDA-approved thiol-containing drugs as potential inhibitors of Metallo-β-Lactamases (MBL) in order to provide insights as to how to restore the effectiveness of β-lactam antibiotics. MBLs inactivate nearly all β-lactam containing antibiotics, which make up more than 50% of currently available antibiotics. No clinically approved MBLs inhibitors are approved for clinical trials. Recent efforts have focused on developing inhibitors to these enzymes. In an effort to understand the mechanism of inhibition(s) of four FDA-approved thiol-containing drugs that were previously reported to be inhibitors of New Delhi Metallo-β-lactamase (NDM-1), various biochemical and spectroscopic techniques were used. By determining the mechanism of inhibition of metal-targeting inhibitors like DL-thiorphan using NDM-1, inhibitors can be redesigned to be more selective. Spectroscopic studies on CoCo-NDM-1, revealed two distinct binding modes for the thiol containing compounds. Our findings validate the need to further investigate the mechanism of inhibition of MBL inhibitors. Further research to identify inhibition capabilities beyond reported IC50 values is necessary for understanding the binding modes of these identified compounds and to provide the necessary foundation for developing clinically-relevant MBL inhibitors. Two manuscripts reporting the findings have been published in the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry and in Biochemistry.