Chemistry Major
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About the Major
Elon’s chemistry program provides the opportunity for students to explore the scientific field through an active curriculum that emphasizes the use of the most current technologies and instrumentation in the classroom, labs and undergraduate research. The curriculum provides a strong base for entrance into graduate school and health-professions schools.
Jobs in Chemistry
- Chemical technician
- Forensic scientist
- Quality control chemist
- Research scientist
- Teacher
Past Elon Chemistry Internships
- Florida Crime Lab
- Cirrus Pharmaceuticals
- Burlington Research
- Mother Murphy's Spices
- Carolina Biological Supply
Related Majors
Lumen Scholar tackled dirty job for science and the environment
Inside a McMichael Science Center chemistry lab, Anna Altmann artificially smoked her second cigarette in a half-hour.
With gloved hands, she placed the cigarette into a nozzle attached to an Erlenmeyer flask, lit it and — using a plastic syringe — drew air through the flask and a couple feet of tubing. Altmann then leaned away from the hood as a faint smell of tobacco smoke filled the lab.
“It’s very smelly, but this just being a couple of cigarettes, it won’t get too bad,” she said.
I was worried I would fail at research and worried it would be difficult to find a mentor and work on a long project. I’m so glad I pushed through that fear.
Scientific research can be a messy process. Sometimes it’s downright dirty.
To better understand how much and what kinds of metals are leaching from and being adsorbed by littered cigarette butts, Altmann knows this all too well. The Goldwater Scholar, Lumen Prize recipient and Honors Fellow spent the last two years of her time at Elon University collecting and studying cigarette butts and using her improvised smoking apparatus to create fresh ones.
Altmann — who graduated from Elon in 2023 as a chemistry and computer science double major — became interested in environmental chemistry before college. A native of Burlington, N.C., she completed general chemistry with Associate Professor Justin Clar while still in high school. As an undergrad searching for honors thesis topics related to chemistry and the environment, Altmann turned to her mentor, Clar, an expert in the study of metals and nanoparticles in environmental systems. He recalled questions he’d had about littered cigarette butts since his post-doctoral work with the EPA.
Altmann dove into existing research and discovered gaps in what had been studied about the release of metals from cigarette butts, namely that cigarettes had been tested in labs but not collected from litter. A light went on and Altmann had the nut of her research question: What and how much are all of these littered butts releasing into or adsorbing from the environment?
Altmann’s drive earned awards nationally and at Elon.
In her sophomore year, she was awarded the prestigious Goldwater Scholarship, one of the most selective awards in the country given to undergraduates intending to pursue research careers in STEM. She was only the second Goldwater Scholar from Elon to win the award as a sophomore. That same year, she was awarded the Lumen Prize, Elon’s top research award that annually provides 15 rising juniors with $20,000 to advance their undergraduate research projects.
In addition to paying for necessary materials during a period of pandemic-related rising costs, those prizes bolstered Altmann’s confidence in her research and afforded opportunities she may not otherwise have had. She attended the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry Conference, twice attended American Chemical Society conferences and traveled to Rice University to give an invited talk.
“Having that money allowed her to network with a lot of people, which is going to open doors for her in graduate school,” Clar said in March 2023, a few months before Altmann graduated. She was accepted to Duke University’s doctoral environmental engineering program and began classes that fall.
As demonstrated by the improvised tube-and-flask method of creating fresh specimens in the lab, Altmann went to great lengths to gather enough samples to glean solid data. That included rallying volunteers over Homecoming Weekend to collect butts around and near campus.
“Elon is a nonsmoking campus, so we weren’t sure if we would find enough, which is why we collected on the day of a big football game when we thought people might be tailgating. We were surprised how many we found,” Altmann said.
That day, they collected four gallon-sized bags of filters — a few thousand butts weighing in close to 2.5 pounds — in various states of degradation. Altmann spent the next few weeks sorting them by their condition, from freshest to most degraded. She analyzed them for metal content and put others in chemical solutions to test for leaching.
Preliminary analysis showed that cigarette butts were both leaching and adsorbing metals. Sodium, magnesium, potassium, calcium and aluminum were leaching in the highest concentrations. The more degraded the butt, overall, the lower the concentration of leaching. Chemical solutions didn’t play a significant role in how much or which metals leached.
Some of the leached metals, like aluminum and zinc, can cause health problems.
“We are most concerned about arsenic, mercury and lead, and we are sending samples to another lab for external analysis of those metals. If we find them, that would be more concerning to us health-wise,” Altmann said in 2023.
Altmann initially found the research process intimidating but said it resulted in the most rewarding part of her college career.
“Just because something is new to you doesn’t mean you can’t do it,” Altmann said. “I was worried I would fail at research and worried it would be difficult to find a mentor and work on a long project. I’m so glad I pushed through that fear.”
Once she became a doctoral student at Duke, she realized just how much Elon had prepared her through those opportunities in the research lab.
“The hands-on research experience I came out of undergrad with was much more than my peers, which helped me with the transition to the new program,” she said in early 2024. “I also have found my classes to be challenging content but doable using the critical-thinking skills I learned to develop in undergrad. I am able to apply those skills along with the large amount of information I retained from classes to help me perform well in grad school while having a good work-life balance.”
Did You Know?
- Chemistry majors experiment and learn in the McMichael Science Center, which is designed to foster collaboration with faculty and fellow classmates. Students work with modern sophisticated instrumentation uncommonly found at the undergraduate level (e.g.,nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometer, infrared spectrometer, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer, X-ray fluorescence spectrometer).
- All Chemistry majors take on original research projects, working closely with faculty mentors who guide them through the discovery process. All students can, and are strongly encouraged to, present their research findings at Elon’s annual Spring Undergraduate Research Forum, and most students travel to professional regional and national scientific conferences, with financial support from the university.
- There are many ways to engage in the field outside the classroom. Students may join Elon’s student affiliate chapter of the American Chemical Society or participate in the national chemistry honorary society, Phi Lambda Upsilon. Students also often secure on-campus employment as teaching assistants in laboratory courses and in the chemical stockroom.