Aimee Tomlinson, associate professor of chemistry at the University of North Georgia (UNG), is a key member of the Molecular Education and Research Consortium in Undergraduate Computational Chemistry (MERCURY), which recently received a $225,000 grant for collaborative undergraduate research.

MERCURY manages research projects among 30 faculty members from 27 primarily undergraduate institutions located all over the country. These projects involve computational chemistry, which combines theoretical chemistry and computer simulation to explain the relationships between molecular structures and their properties.

The grant was awarded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation program which allows those receiving the grant to collaborate more efficiently and increase the visibility of their work.

"My students and I will be able to use this funding to perform computations for our work, which leads to publications and thereby the ability to receive additional funded grants," Tomlinson said.

Tomlinson has been a member of MERCURY for the past five years. Since 2001, the year of MERCURY’s inception, the researchers involved have received more than $1.5 million in funding, published more than 230 papers, and worked with hundreds of students on research projects.

The program’s student population has been 75 percent female and minorities, and half of its graduates have received advanced degrees in STEM fields.  In addition, these brilliant students have won more than 50 national awards, including a Rhodes Scholarship, 10 Fulbright fellowships, 8 Goldwater scholarships, 2 Gates Cambridge Scholarships, and more than 15 national graduate fellowships.