Lon Porter Gets Involved With Students In/Out of Classroom

"Hays Hall is the most amazing research facility I’ve ever worked in. It is completely top-of-the-line in every way. I have seven students doing research with me right now and that’s an impressive number by anyone’s standards."

That is the assessment of Lon Porter, Bryon K. Trippet Assistant Professor of Chemistry, who is beginning his third year as member of the Wabash faculty. At 29, he is not much older than some of his students, but he is definitely the professor. He is proud to say that the facilities in the new science building allow him to take every student who expresses a real interest in research, but he goes on to say: "I have dismissed a few who weren’t serious about the project."

The project is enough to make any aspiring chemist long for a chance to be part of the team Porter has assembled. They are working on a computer chip that can determine how much insulin a diabetic needs at any given time and deliver it. The two most difficult aspects of the project are making the computer chip stay safely inside a human body for a sustained period of time. As Porter points out, it would be a relief for adults who must check their insulin levels frequently, but for young children with diabetes it would be a great breakthrough. Their preliminary research makes them suspect that all this may be accomplished with simple and fairly inexpensive chemicals.

The work is sometimes tedious and always intense.  "Ninety-nine percent of the time in science you don’t get the answer you want, so I try to keep up my students’ morale," he said. "We go to the movies; watch old horror films in a room in Hays Hall; play video games sometimes; get a pizza and hang out; or play dodge ball. It’s fun for me to get to know the students. I helped out the Brew Society last year because the guys were serious about what they were doing. It was really fun.
"When we are doing research, I’m learning with my students rather than just teaching them. It’s a good experience for all of us. It reminds me of one important thing I want them to learn: that in science you are always banging your head against a wall. You either walk away or keep hitting ‘til the wall falls down."

He encourages them in other ways, too. His wife, Maureen McColgin, who will teach biology at Wabash this year, is a skilled baker. Last year when Porter took some students to the Chemical Society of America convention in San Diego, she sent a large box of her best chocolate-chocolate chip cookies as sustenance during airport layovers. Porter won’t quite say they were the hit of the trip, but one of those students, who graduated last year, called the Porters this year to ask for the recipe.

This year he will try to take more students to the Chemical Society meeting, which is in Atlanta. It is very important, he knows, for the young men to be exposed to some of the best scientists in the country and to learn first-hand how many career paths are open to chemists. He and his wife would also like to take a group of students to Ecuador next summer on a biochemistry immersion trip. And if that weren’t enough, this year some chemistry students will host local high school students to carry out a short research project. They will offer prizes for the best work. That production will be jointly sponsored by the Chemistry Club and the Biology Society, two interests groups that have been created on campus in the last few years.

For a while fate seemed to be pulling Lon Porter back from a life in the liberal arts. When he attended the University of Houston, a large commuter college in his hometown, it was only by being admitted to the small Honors College within the University that he had a taste of a liberal arts environment. Ironically, he was part of a research group in the chemistry department.  When he considered graduate schools, he was accepted at Harvard and MIT, but at dinner while visiting Harvard all the prospective students spent the time writing equations on their napkins. "That just wasn’t what I wanted," Porter says. "I knew that getting patents and grading 500 papers at a time would not give me a happy life."

He chose Purdue University, where even in the chemistry Ph.D. program he was able to finagle his own liberal arts curriculum. In addition to all his required courses, he took engineering and a course in food chemistry. "I really like to cook, so I liked learning why caramel is brown."

Once the Ph.D. was in hand, he looked for a job and found Wabash College, which seemed to Porter and his wife a dream come true. They enjoy Crawfordsville. They bought and are refurbishing the huge house on West Main Street with a Wabash history of its own. It was once the TEKE fraternity house and for many years it was home to the late Professor Eric Dean and his wife. It will be a happy Wabash home again, often full of students and faculty.

Cantrell is a senior writer in Wabash College Public Affairs.

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