Brandon Campbell (Nocera Lab) pitches in Harvard Horizons talks

At Harvard, thousands of scholars are working to advance knowledge on a wide array of topics. Eight students are selected each year to workshop ways to bring that knowledge from the University to the wider world through Harvard Horizons.

Now in its 12th year, the program invites doctoral candidates to share their work in a one-night academic symposium. Students receive one-on-one mentoring to hone their presentation skills and research ideas.

“It is crucial that both faculty and students are able to communicate and connect with the broader world,” said Karen Thornber, the Richard L. Menschel Faculty Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. “These multimodal skills are foundational, both for engaging students in the classroom and for ensuring that research which has the potential to contribute significantly to the well-being of all is both accessible and impactful to a wider audience.”

Harvard Horizons is a project of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Bok Center.

Tapping silver to lower drug costs

Brandon Campbell

Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Silver, according to Campbell, may be good for more than jewelry. His work is attempting to use silver in a chemical process that would make the production of pharmaceuticals a fraction of the current cost. The trifluoromethyl group is essential to many modern drugs, but it can be hard to synthesize. Using photochemistry, Campbell has been working to utilize trifluoroacetate as a trifluoromethyl source — a notoriously hard process.

To do this, he’s utilizing a special type of silver (Ag²⁺) — a highly reactive form of the metal that can be recycled and reused to not only cut costs but potentially also make strides in sustainability.

“At the outset of my Ph.D., very few Ag²⁺ compounds had ever been made before. But in this absence of knowledge, in this lack of precedence, I saw opportunity, and I seized it by devising a new synthetic strategy toward isolating large quantities of silver compounds,” Campbell said.