Franklin & Marshall College

Benzonitrile as a Solvatochromic IR Probe

For Dan Aschaffenburg, diligence pays off. It paid off when he approached his General Chemistry Professor, Dr. Richard Moog, leading to the offer of a Hackman Scholarship as a first-year student.

It paid off in his junior year when his dogged pursuit of an inconsistency in the chemistry literature led to the remarkable discovery of widespread misapplication of the solvatochromic equation—a problem causing incorrect interpretations and analyses in numerous published studies.

And Aschaffenburg’s diligence likely will pay off again as his research turns to published works in the Journal of Physical Chemistry . “It’s that drive for wanting to know the unknown that I love, which, I think, makes me a good chemist,” Aschaffenburg says. “There are people who are very smart and intelligent who can take chemistry class and do very well, but research takes a certain drive. It requires initiative.”

In Physical Chemistry, this hard work has to be maintained even though it is often unclear what the ultimate application of the research results may be. “You do it for the pursuit of knowledge, for what’s not known, and you hope that it proves useful to someone,” he says. “You’ll never know why your research is important until many years pass to see how people use it. It’s not until later when someone takes your research, puts it together with something else and gets something no one ever expected.”

Aschaffenburg’s current research looks at how different molecules interact in a solution. By studying the vibrational energy of the nitrile probe, Aschaffenburg is able to describe the solvent environment accurately. This precision may lead to a more sensitive and nuanced measurement of human internal states, contributing to greater understanding of chemical processes within the body. Aschaffenburg points out how important it is to understand the microenvironments of proteins, enzymes and lipids, because that’s how the body works, and the chemistry involved only happens in very small areas of enzymes.

Aschaffenburg, already accepted to several top graduate schools, including Yale and Brown, has high praise for the research opportunities he found at F&M. “One of the great things about Franklin & Marshall and the chemistry department is that they give you all the research opportunities you can handle,” he says. “I’ve been going on graduate school visits and I talk with the other students who go to big research universities and they will laugh with each other about how their first summer all they did was wash beakers. And I’m thinking to myself: ‘I was involved in hands-on research. I was taking the data, thinking what to do next, interpreting the data; I wasn’t just some extra body in the lab.’”