When Yalan “Christie” Ning joined Huston-Tillotson University (HT) as an assistant professor a decade ago, she was challenged to build a chemistry laboratory essentially from scratch. With a 150-year history in East Austin, HT is a private, historically Black university currently serving 1,000 students.
“The school has such limited resources, the only items in the ‘lab’ were some dusty beakers and old glassware,” she recalled. “Those first years, I worked as a visiting professor at DOE (Department of Energy) and Air Force labs in the summer so I could involve my students in research. Support from The Welch Foundation was absolutely essential in helping me create the opportunity for our students to do research on campus.”
Thanks to longstanding support from The Welch Foundation, she has been able to secure three National Science Foundation grants to further support her students' research.
Dr. Ning proudly points to equipment purchased thanks to Welch funding, including a sonicator, NMR tube washer, refrigerator for chemicals, rotary evaporator with chiller, centrifuge, vacuum oven, Milli DI water purification system, and two types of beam balances.
A Welch equipment grant in 2024 allowed the school to purchase an analysis bench NMR spectrometer and a UV-vis spectrometer to further increase the lab’s research capabilities.
Dr. Ning earned her PhD at Colorado State University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. When her husband’s job took them to Austin, she joined HT. As program head, she has taught 18 chemistry courses, mentored more than 30 undergraduates with their research, and 12 faculty in their teaching. Despite her heavy teaching load, she relishes the opportunity to work with students on research in her lab.
Drawing on her background in inorganic and organometallic chemistry, Dr. Ning involves students in catalyst design and functionalization experiments.
“We focus on relatively simple processes with two to three steps,” she explained. “Students learn to prepare, synthesize, characterize, and polymerize iron complexes.”
The research explores the complexes’ role in metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) for polymerization. MOFs’ versatility opens up potential applications in gas storage, gas separation, chemical sensing, drug delivery, and catalysis. Her current focus is on synthesizing less expensive, greener industrial catalysts to produce lubricants and gasoline products.
Leveraging the Welch and NSF grants, she can hire up to 10 undergraduate students each year, focusing on work related to course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs).
“It has been so rewarding to build a research program here,” Dr. Ning said. “It would have been impossible without Welch support. But watching students get excited about chemistry and research makes it so worthwhile.”
Over the last 10 years, two of her lab alumni have had summer internships in DOE and most have found lucrative jobs at in industry or pursued graduate education.