Mellon College of Science

I am an assistant professor in the High Energy Physics group at Carnegie Mellon University. I work on the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Previously, I was postdoc at the University of Chicago, and I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.

Bruce was born in Niagara Falls (NY) and raised in Lewiston (NY), a few miles downstream from the Falls. He attended the University of Rochester and received his Bachelor's of Science degree in Chemistry in 1988. He performed undergraduate research with Professor David G. Whitten, studying photochemical reactions in organized media such as reversed micelles and lipid bilayers. Bruce also spent two summers working in the labs of Drs. Samir Farid and Ian Gould at Eastman Kodak Company, studying the relationship between the thermodynamics and the kinetics of electron transfer reactions within the Marcus inverted region.

Bruce performed his Ph.D. work at the University of Arizona, studying photoinduced electron transfer, energy transfer and polymerization reactions within lipid bilayers under the supervision of Professor David F. O'Brien. After completing his Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1993, he joined Professor Gary B. Schuster's group at the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral fellow, working on the design of new DNA photocleavage agents.

Bruce moved to Georgia Tech with the Schuster group in 1995 to continue this work. Bruce then spent the summer of 1997 in Denmark, working in the labs of Professors Peter E. Nielsen and Henrik Nielsen at the University of Copenhagen, studying the interactions between peptide nucleic acid (PNA) oligomers and RNA.

In August of 1997, Bruce moved to Carnegie Mellon University as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He was promoted to Associate and then Full Professor of Chemistry, with courtesy appointments in the Departments of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering. In 2007, Bruce co-founded the Center for Nucleic Acids Science and Technology, which he co-directs with John Woolford of the Department of Biological Sciences. In 2011, Bruce and Danith Ly co-founded PNA Innovations, Inc, a biotechnology startup company that is commercializing gammaPNA technology under an exclusive license from Carnegie Mellon.

Bruce takes great pleasure in teaching undergraduate organic chemistry and graduate courses in medicinal chemistry and sensors. Bruce’s current research interests include the use of PNA for sequence-specific recognition of DNA and RNA and the development of new fluorescence imaging and sensing reagents, as described in the Research section of this website.

Stefan Bernhard started his chemistry career as a laboratory technician with Chocolat Tobler, which was followed by a degree in chemical engineering from the Ingenieurschule Burgdorf. Further endeavours, under Prof. Peter Belser at the Université de Fribourg, were rewarded with a diploma and a PhD in chemistry. These primarily synthetic studies were complemented by a laser spectroscopy project at Los Alamos National Laboratory with Dr Jon Schoonover and time in the Abruña group at Cornell University focused on electrochemistry. Stefan Bernhard’s first faculty appointment at Princeton University explored luminescent metal complexes for optoelectronic and solar conversion applications. He moved to Carnegie Mellon University in July 2009 where he was promoted to the rank of Professor in 2014.

Associate Teaching Professor and Assistant Department Head for Graduate Affairs
I am advisor for The Sciences Teaching Club, NeuroSAC, and the Nu Rho Psi Honor Society.

In working with students to get them involved in understanding how scientists ask questions, think about problems, and communicate their results, I also serve as CMU's faculty advisor to a team of reviewers who work for IMPULSE: The Premier Undergraduate Neuroscience Journal. In working with undergraduate students, I help them to publish their results in IMPULSE or in other peer-reviewed journals.

Amy L. Burkert is Vice Provost for Education at Carnegie Mellon University. She is responsible for university-wide education initiatives at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Dr. Burkert has spearheaded the development of new pathways for science students to grow intellectually and personally, especially during their undergraduate years. She helped to create new interdisciplinary options (the Bachelor of Science and Arts degree and the Science and Humanities Scholars Program); the unified major in biological sciences and psychology; the biomedical engineering minor for non-engineering students; and the minor in health care policy and management. She also helped to develop the intercollegiate bachelor's degree and master’s degree programs in computational biology.

tudent advising has always been special focus for Dr. Burkert. She has participated in the CMU-wide Advising Task Force that has done much to professionalize the role of advisors on campus. She co-chaired a faculty committee on the Second Year Experience, and partnered with faculty and staff in the development of the Big Questions project for first-year students. She has been active in outreach and expanding diversity, participating as an instructor and advisor in the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for Science and the Summer Academy of Math and Science.

Dr. Burkert pioneered new courses in biological sciences, and collaborated with MCS colleagues to create EUREKA, a first-year seminar for MCS students that combines the disciplines of biological sciences, physics, chemistry, and mathematical sciences, and has championed the use of reflective writing for science students.

A champion of sustainability science, Terry Collins is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Green Chemistry and the Director of the Institute for Green Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Collins invented "TAML® Activators", the first, full-functional, small molecule mimics of any of the great families of oxidizing enzymes. In the process, one of the great challenges of reaction chemistry has been solved—easy deployment of the mimicked efficient catalytic cycles of oxidative metabolism. Today, NewTAMLs are the best performers.

Collins learned of the insidious health damage caused by anthropogenic chemical pollutants in his native New Zealand. He launched his academic career by creating an iterative catalyst design protocol to explore whether biomimetic processes for disinfecting water could be developed to replace chlorine and avoid chlorinated disinfection products. TAML and NewTAML activators are the principal fruits, greatly outperforming the enzymes while enabling applications exhibiting or promising high technical, cost, health, environmental and fairness performances. Collins framed the argument that high health, environmental and fairness performances define sustainable chemicals and need to be integrated with comparable weight to the technical and cost performances that typically define commercial viability.

How does one build strong health, environmental and fairness performances into new chemicals? From what we understand today, the most important strategy consists of gaining precommercial confidence that a new chemical does not elicit low dose or low concentration (for aquatic life) adverse effects (lodafs or locafs) in living things—endocrine disruption is the best understood suite of underlying mechanisms. Endocrine disruptors (EDs) represent major health and environmental threats especially by eliciting developmental effects that permanently impair living things. ED dose-response curves are typically non-monotonic, confounding identification by assays that assume linear dose-responses as are typical of regulatory science.

Until recently, no one knew how to develop such confidence. Collins was a member of a team of 25+ environmental health scientists and green chemists who worked under private funding for 4 years to produce the Tiered Protocol for Endocrine Disruption (TiPED). The living TiPED was published in the journal "Green Chemistry" in January of 2013. It allows EDs to be identified at the highest levels of contemporary science. TAML activators have been subjected to TiPED assays supporting that commercially developed examples are not EDs toward the many examined endpoints.

Of importance to sustainability, TAML activators catalytically activate hydrogen peroxide to eliminate micro-pollutants and pathogens from water with superb technical performances while promising excellent environmental, fairness and cost performances. By mimicking oxidative metabolism, TAML processes rapidly destroy estrogens and many other EDs, active pharmaceutical ingredients, phenols including recalcitrant chloro and nitro-phenols, nitroaromatic explosives, pesticides, chemical warfare agents, and dyes. The hardiest of microbes, bacterial spores, are simply inactivated with an outstanding 7-log kill in 15-minutes. These discoveries are underpinning new technologies for treating diverse wastewaters and enabling other products.

TAML activators have been shown in multiple labs to selectively oxidize unactivated C–H bonds. They can be used catalytically or electrocatalytically to oxidize water giving clear-cut cases of water oxidation via the most earth abundant transition metal, iron. Many other application areas are being explored and others are likely to be discovered.

For over two decades, Terry Collins has been perfecting what is the first university course in Green Chemistry—today the class is entitled “Chemistry and Sustainability”. He has delivered over 600 public lectures and is an author on over 200 publications, mostly in peer-reviewed journals.

Collins earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from the University of Auckland. He joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty in 1987. Among his honors are the 2018 Carnegie Science Center Award for the Environment, the 2010 Heinz Award for the Environment, the inaugural Charles E. Kaufman Award of the Pittsburgh Foundation, the 2007 Award of The New York Metropolitan Catalysis Society, the USEPA’s 1999 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, the Pittsburgh Award from the American Chemical Society, Japan’s Society of Pure and Applied Coordination Chemistry Award, and many others. Collins is a Distinguished Alumni Award recipient from the University of Auckland where he is an Honorary Professor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (Hon), the ACS, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and he received a Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award.

I am a professor at Carnegie Mellon University where I work in the Mathematical Sciences Department.

My main research interest is set theory and mathematical logic, and I am part of the CMU interdisciplinary program in logic.
When I'm not doing maths I enjoy reading, movies and travel. On the left those of you with graphical browsers can see a picture of me and my wife Julia Deems taken at the highly recommended Log Country Inn in Ithaca NY. Below you will find a few links to things I've done or been interested in over the last few years.

An internationally respected educator and researcher in applied mathematics; Irene Fonseca is the director of Carnegie Mellon's Center for Nonlinear Analysis (CNA).

In recognition for her contributions to the advancement of research in her area of expertise, Irene Fonseca was bestowed a knighthood in the Military Order of St. James (Grande Oficial da Ordem Militar de Santiago da Espada) by the then-President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, in 1997. For her teaching and research contributions to Carnegie Mellon University, Irene Fonseca was honored with the Mellon College of Science endowed chair in 2003 and named a University Professor in 2014. In 2012 she was elected President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), one of the largest organizations dedicated to mathematics and computational science in the world. In 2018 Irene Fonseca was installed as the first Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Before that I was an H.C. Wang Assistant Professor at Cornell University and a Ph.D. student at TU Berlin. During the Fall semester 2017 I was at MSRI in Berkeley.