F&M Stories

Dr. Scott Brewer is enthusiastically engaged in several research projects that have attracted impressive national and international recognition from his professional colleagues. His biophysical chemistry research program is highly interdisciplinary and involves organic chemistry, biochemistry, and spectroscopy—highlighting his research versatility.

Dr. Brewer's best-known work involves attaching vibrational reporters to specific locations in proteins and nucleic acids in order to investigate the structure and dynamics of these biomolecules. These tiny reporter groups contain only two or three atoms, yet the messages they send can be detected by an infrared spectrometer. This instrument uses the same wavelengths of light as found in a TV remote control. The spectroscopic results provide information on the amount of water present in the local environment. This approach has advantages over other methods because the reporter groups are so small that they essentially do not disrupt the native structure of the biomolecule being studied. Current work involves extending this approach to measure distances between two reporter groups within one biomolecule.

Dr. Brewer has published 47 journal articles, 24 of which have appeared since his arrival at F&M in 2007. This work has had a major impact on his field and has been cited more than 1,700 times. In 2015 alone, his work was cited over 200 times. Demonstrating the high value he places on collaboration with students, he has mentored or co-mentored more than 50 F&M research students and has published journal articles with 28 F&M student co-authors, while also encouraging and supporting student presentations at national scientific conferences. A thoughtful and conscientious mentor, he has helped students navigate their college experience and post-graduate plans with uncompromised individual attention and support.

Dr. Brewer's research has been supported by numerous funding agencies, including a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation, two R15 grants from the National Institutes of Health, and grants from the Research Corporation and the Dreyfus Foundation. He has been awarded more than $1 million in external funding to support his F&M research program.

Generous with his time and knowledge, Dr. Brewer is a catalyst for research in the Chemistry Department and has published journal articles with four departmental colleagues—Ed Fenlon, Ken Hess, Ryan Mehl and Christine Phillips-Piro—as well as several external collaborators. Fenlon, a longstanding collaborator, says, "Scott's philosophy regarding writing a journal article or grant proposal reminds one of the famous editor Robert Gottlieb's three rules: 'Get it done. Do it now. Check, check, and check again,' and his admonishment to 'Stop thinking about writing, and start typing! Just sit down and do it.'" Other departmental colleagues note Dr. Brewer's humility despite his numerous accomplishments.

In 2015, Dr. Brewer was awarded the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, which recognizes faculty who demonstrate "leadership in original scholarly research of outstanding quality, substantially with undergraduates, as well as excellence and dedication in undergraduate education." Dr. Brewer is an outstanding teacher-scholar who inspires his students and engages them in a friendly yet challenging way both in the classroom and the laboratory. For all of these reasons, Scott Brewer is the worthy recipient of the Bradley R. Dewey Award for Outstanding Scholarship.

Associate Professor of Chemistry Scott H. Brewer, 2018 recipient of the Bradley R. Dewey Award for Outstanding Scholarship