Good Chemistry

Shanan Glandz, 10/5/2007

Professor Mike Haaf works with a student.

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Department of Chemistry

What draws an alumnus back to Ithaca College? Assistant professor of chemistry Mike Haaf knows. After graduating with honors from Ithaca College in 1994 and completing his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2000 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Professor Haaf taught at other institutions before returning to his alma mater as professor and chair of the chemistry department. He was recently honored with tenure.

“What drew me here [to teach] was the same thing that appealed to me as an undergrad,” Haaf says, noting the College’s academic flexibility and accommodation as its greatest strengths. “I felt IC had a lot of very strong programs, and because of its size, it felt like a miniature university.”

After teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Baraboo and Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Haaf moved back to Ithaca in 2002. “I loved the area and the surrounding town as an undergrad, and one of the big reasons I came back was to live and work in Ithaca,” he says.

This semester, Professor Haaf is teaching organic chemistry. His energetic style and detailed presentation guide students through the tangled web of benzene rings and aromatic compound structures that fill up the blackboards by the end of lecture. “Students keep me young and enthusiastic. I feel I have a lot to offer them,” he explains. “It feels good to watch them develop and see that lightbulb of understanding go off.”

That personal rapport with students goes a long way. “It is clear to everyone who has [Haaf] for a professor that he is at Ithaca to teach,” says Jason Diaz ’09, a student in Haaf’s Organic Chemistry II class. “He readily invites people to his office for extra help in his classes or just to chat.”

Professor Haaf is involved in several student organizations in addition to teaching classes. Currently he is the faculty advisor of IC’s Chemistry Club, which does many kinds of community outreach in the area. The club, open to majors and nonmajors who have a passion for the field, can be found demonstrating chemistry experiments in grade schools, presenting science programs at Ithaca’s Sciencenter, and hosting famous speakers on campus. Last year, the club held a talk with Nobel Prize winner (in chemistry) Roald Hoffmann. Professor Haaf has also served as the chemistry liaison to IC’s Premedical Science Committee since 2003.

In any bachelor of science program, there should be laboratory time and fieldwork available for students to pursue. Ithaca College offers a multitude of scientific research opportunities both at the College and abroad. According to Haaf, “Every faculty in chemistry does hands-on research projects.”

Students are free to cross departmental boundaries if they have the right qualifications. “I’ve done research with biochemistry majors, and a lot of biochemistry majors get experience in the biology department as well,” he says.

On average, about three to six students get positions in a given faculty member’s lab each year, and students can choose from several faculty projects according to what best suits their interests and level of experience. “I worked on creating an inhibitor for an enzyme that another professor in the department is working on,” says Diaz, who was a member of Haaf’s student research team last fall. “Professor Haaf was there to guide us and give us tips or advice, but he left us to figure things out and learn how to do be independent in the lab. I learned a lot about what goes into synthetic chemistry and [about] doing independent research as well.”

The research on which Ithaca’s science students and professors collaborate has big implications.

Currently stirring in Professor Haaf’s research lab is a study on how antioxidants fight oxidative damage in mitochondria. “Oxidative damage is implicated in a number of human diseases, ranging from Alzheimer’s to ALS [Lou Gehrig’s disease] to aging,” Haaf explained. “A lot of this damage originates in the mitochondria of cells.”

Working with students in the lab, Professor Haaf hopes to design “a sort of [mitochondriaspecific] ‘guided weaponry’ to combat destructive free radicals.”

The aim of this research is to develop a defense system that is a “cocktail” of substances that target a certain disease. Although there may not yet be a cure, mediation of long-term damage is a medically and socially significant result of this type of research.

Haaf believes that incoming students have a lot to gain from studying at Ithaca. “I think Ithaca offers opportunities that aren’t available at larger schools,” Haaf says. “Students get much more direct interaction and hands-on experience at a smaller school than at an enormous university.”

Diaz agrees. “At larger universities it is graduate students who predominately populate the labs.”

But the good chemistry between Haaf and his students isn’t a fluke. “I think Mike Haaf is pretty iconic of the sciences at Ithaca College,” Diaz adds. “Ithaca makes a priority of hiring professors that are committed to teaching, not necessarily just doing research.”

Originally published in Fuse: Good Chemistry.