At Franklin & Marshall, a distinctive opportunity for hands-on learning gives students the chance to participate in collaborative research as early as their second week on campus. 

The Nanobots Research Club meets weekly and aims to help students interested in STEM research connect with each other in a casual, drop-in setting, while learning to use computational chemistry tools.

Students in Nanobots also get to make tangible contributions to the scientific community through their work. Seven members of the club were co-authors of a paper published in The Journal of Inorganic Chemistry. 

Kate Plass, Department Chair and Professor of Chemistry, said the club evolved out of an informal group of students from her general chemistry course, who joined her to experiment with a new modeling software. 

The Amsterdam Modeling Suite (AMS) makes it possible to simulate chemical reactions in the growth of materials with less computing power than is typically required. Rather than needing hours of time and a supercomputer, students can run simulations on a typical laptop. 

Plass said these simulations are useful for learning how to control the size, shape and chemical composition of nanoparticles. The properties of these materials, which can be used in technologies from solar cells to photothermal cancer treatments, depend on how they absorb light. Running these simulations helps understand the chemical reactions they observe in the lab. 

“We want to simulate, atom by atom, how these materials come together,” Plass said. “We might have a hypothesis of what’s going on in the ‘goo’—so let’s see what that looks like on the computer. Does our simulation help us make sense of what we’re seeing in the experiment?” 

Benjamin Schmidt ’25 is one of the students involved in the early days of Nanobots and one of the co-authors of the published paper. He was excited by the opportunity to dive right into hands-on research. “I loved the idea of learning additional skills outside of the classroom,” he said. 

Students were drawn to the informal meetings and wanted to continue the research, and suggested to Plass that they become an official club, so they could attend student involvement fairs and invite others to join. They wrote the club’s constitution and took on leadership roles, focusing on creating a welcoming research community. 

“Nanobots has a wonderful club community where both students and faculty become one another’s support system. I was able to meet students in my major and receive course recommendations and information about on-campus summer research opportunities.”

Tiffany Li '27

“As I was trying to navigate how to get involved with research on campus, Nanobots stood out as a welcoming and accessible way to enter the research space,” said Hannah Talesnik ’26, co-president of the club. 

The club offers first-year students advice and mentorship from both faculty and other students that can launch them into further research opportunities. 

“Nanobots has a wonderful club community where both students and faculty become one another’s support system,” Tiffany Li ’27 said. “I was able to meet students in my major and receive course recommendations and information about on-campus summer research opportunities.”

"Being part of Nanobots has shaped my F&M experience by making research more accessible and showing me how important it is to have spaces where people of all skill levels can come together and learn from one another."

Hannah Talesnik '25

Plass emphasized how transformative the research experience can be for students, and how useful it can be for them to get that experience as early as possible.

“Once you know you can go into the lab and design an experiment to ask a question about the world that nobody has ever asked before, and then you can answer it—that really changes how you view yourself and your capability,” Plass said. “You can really see it change students’ self-confidence.”

“I gained an understanding of what being a researcher is, and learned how to collaborate with others to answer a research question,” Schmidt said. 

For Talesnik, the remarkable outcomes of the club drove home the importance of creating collaborative and approachable spaces for scientific research. 

“Being part of Nanobots has shaped my F&M experience by making research more accessible and showing me how important it is to have spaces where people of all skill levels can come together and learn from one another,” she said.