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About the Virginia-North Carolina Alliance:

The Virginia-North Carolina Alliance is led by the University of Virginia and includes the following partners: Bennett College for Women, Elizabeth City State University, George Mason University, Johnson C. Smith University, Piedmont Virginia Community College, St. Augustine's University, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Virginia Tech.

Funded by the National Science Foundation's Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program, the VA-NC Alliance offers individually tailored recruitment, retention, and enhancement activities to support students such as bridge programs, stipends, symposia, tutoring, mentoring, workshops, and research experiences.

The VA-NC Alliance's primary goal is to increase significantly the number of students earning STEM (Science, Technology, and Engineering, and Mathematics) baccalaureate degrees. 

 

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Students Kennedy Johnson, Nicole Sciortino, Jolie Nyiramahirwe, and David Vasquez

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During the summer of 2012, VA-NC Alliance undergraduate researchers detected a new molecule in space! Summer researcher, David Vasquez, described the discovery:

"We ran an experiment in the lab I am working in with two graduate students, and discovered a new molecule in space by using Ammonia and Methylcyanide.  Basically we hit the gas molecules with a lot of voltage in a chamber where the molecules break their bonds and form radicals which form new molecules. We looked at the spectra of these new molecules formed and compared it to Green Bank Telescope (GBT) data. For the next four weeks we worked with this molecule and measured it at many different frequencies and analyzed the data. We wrote a proposal to work with the GBT to look for the molecule in space, work with that data, and get a paper published hopefully. This is pretty amazing.  They told us that there have been astrochemists who work their whole life and never find new molecules or get a paper published and we did this in our first experiment of the summer."

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Check out this YouTube video

about the VA-NC Alliance Summer Research Program!

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