LEoPARD is Real World Ready

We are thrilled and honoured to announce that as of August 1st, 2021, LEoPARD has found a new home at Spring Hill College, with Chris accepting a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor of Biochemistry therein. Spring Hill College is a small, highly-selective liberal arts college, deeply rooted in the Jesuit tradition, of ~1,300 students, located in beautiful Mobile, Alabama — a bay city contiguous with the Florida Panhandle.

While we’re thrilled with this fresh and exciting beginning — to be surrounded by highly-ambitious students who want to earn their way at a selective college — it comes with many challenges. Notably, although LEoPARD earned numerous internal and external grants during its previous posting at Colorado Mesa University — through which it purchased consumables and equipment — we were denied the opportunity to bring these resources to Spring Hill College, causing a “break” in our research momentum and a need to entirely rebuild our infrastructure from the ground up. This allows us to blaze an exciting new trail, but it also requires a steadfast commitment and tenacity to effectively reboot our research.

To that end, LEoPARD is seeking highly-motivated, dedicated, ambitious, and adventurous students who are interested in making both intensive and long-term commitments to undergraduate research in biochemistry at Spring Hill College. While we are happy to consider students beginning their final year (i.e. seniors), we are particularly enthused to hear from students who have more than one year remaining at Spring Hill College — namely juniors, sophomores, and even freshmen in exceptional cases. There is a strong and unique opportunity in this situation, to gain unparalleled experience in helping to create and establish a new institutional research program, and take on a leadership role while doing so; contrast this against the interchangeable “plug-and-play” roles often delegated to undergraduate students — where undergraduates in larger and/or more-established research labs may be assigned to more mundane and humdrum tasks that require little thinking or initiative. New students involved in this groundbreaking phase of LEoPARD’s tenure at Spring Hill College will not only partake in experimental lab work, but will also be involved in reconfiguring our research space, setting up equipment and infrastructure, contributing to the writing of grants for funding, and establishing reproducible experimental protocols, among other things.

If you are a Spring Hill College student interested in biochemistry-related research, please send an email to cdieni@shc.edu. If you know a Spring Hill College student who would be interested in biochemistry-related research, please direct them to this page.