The Wei Family Private Foundation supports Oregon State students working on complex problems across disciplines – from tracking PFAS in urban environments and studying Alzheimer’s disease at the molecular level to modeling vaccine protection and developing new battery materials – advancing work that addresses global challenges in health, the environment and energy.
The honors general chemistry sequence is one of the longest-running honors offerings at OSU, and the three-term series gives participating students access to advanced laboratory experiences, faculty mentorship and a learning community that often shapes their academic paths in their very first year.
How statistics students can land jobs at top companies like AbbVie — the power of conferences at Oregon State University. Alumna Chenyang Duan (Ph.D. Statistics, ‘23) landed a full-time position as senior statistician at AbbVie, one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world.
Physicist Oksana Ostroverkhova is studying organic semiconductors in her laboratory at Oregon State, exploring how light interacts with these materials and how those interactions can be harnessed to create new optoelectronic and photonic devices.
In the College of Science, materials scientist May Nyman and doctoral student Esther Julius are designing molecules that could help push the limits of traditional semiconductor manufacturing.
Margie Haak, a senior instructor in Oregon State University’s Department of Chemistry, has received the 2026 Outstanding Educator – Higher Education Award from the Oregon Academy of Science, recognizing more than three decades of dedication to teaching, mentorship and science outreach.
Both of the 2026 publications involve fluorescent proteins and their “core” chromophores that were first discovered in marine organisms such as jellyfish and coral. The earlier work focused on novel red-emitting graphene-sheet-based carbon dots engineered by the Cheng lab at College of Engineering.
Microbiologist Stephen Giovannoni received a 5-year $1.2 million award to continue studying the microbiology of the Sargasso Sea, an ocean gyre that is representative of ocean regions with extremely low productivity that are expanding globally due to the warming of the ocean’s surface.
The researchers used a molecule measuring technique to observe in a laboratory setting how certain metals can promote the protein clumping that leads to the blocked neural pathways associated with Alzheimer’s.
