MARSHALL, Minn.

Friday, March 17, 2000

MARSHALL, Minn. – When Keith Schwartz was growing up in Austin, his mother often found him in the kitchen combining ingredients out of the cupboards to see what he could make. As a curious child, he knew that the right consistency of cornstarch and water, when formed into a solid ball in your hand, would run right through your fingers like liquid when you let go.

His mother, then a preschool teacher, often brought home ideas for similar experiments for Schwartz and his brothers.

"He was always goofing around in the kitchen," said his mother, Delene Schwartz.

Now a 22-year-old college student, Schwartz frequently can be found in the undergraduate research area of Southwest State University’s science and math building. Dressed in his white lab coat and protective eye goggles, he spends from eight to 10 hours each week researching a chemical compound that may be of medical importance one day.

Schwartz’s fascination of chemistry extends beyond the research lab as well. Mike Darveaux, a long-time friend of Schwartz, said: "We’ll be sitting in a bar somewhere and Keith will pick up a glass and start talking about how cool it is to know the molecular composition of the glass and the beer he’s drinking."

Schwartz, a senior majoring in chemistry, put his curiosity to good use this year. He has won an American Chemical Society award for undergraduate research excellence in a national competition.

Sponsored by the R.W. Johnson Pharmaceutical Research Institute, this award will help fund his trip to the American Chemical Society’s spring national meeting in San Francisco. At this meeting, Schwartz will present the results of his research efforts at the undergraduate poster session.

"He was competing against students at very large universities," said Jay Brown, assistant professor of chemistry and under whose guidance Schwartz is doing his award-winning work. "For a student at SSU to get it is quite an honor."

Brown said Schwartz is one of his best researchers and possesses all the elements of a great chemist.

"He has a great amount of potential," Brown said. "He works very, very hard in class. He also works very hard in research. I’m very proud of him."

Schwartz is creating a compound that Brown began to work with three years ago but did not finish studying. He is attempting to make the compound 99 percent pure, at which time he will do a study on it to determine its three-dimensional structure, Brown said. Schwartz hopes to then publish the results.

The compound Schwartz is studying is of pharmaceutical interest, Brown said.

"This compound has a unique structure," Brown said. "Some people believe it could be used to control blood sugar levels in the body."

Schwartz intends to make chemistry his life’s work. It wasn’t always this way. He once flirted with other ideas.

"I used to want to go into dentistry, but I thought once you get a practice, you have to settle down and be there. But with chemistry you can pick up and travel the world doing research," Schwartz said. "That would be more interesting than being settled down in one town doing one job."

After he graduates, Schwartz plans to go onto graduate school, get a doctorate in organic chemistry with an emphasis in analytical chemistry, and then synthesize drugs for a big name company, he said.

"Then I’ll probably settle down and be a high school teacher or a professor," Schwartz said. "Depends on what happens. Depends if I like research."

Schwartz said his fascination with chemistry began in high school, when chemistry was his favorite class. Another of Schwartz’s passions is singing, which he satisfied in high school as a member of show choir.

"He was always singing around the house," said his brother, 18-year-old Derek Schwartz.

Keith Schwartz’s love of performing carried over into college. While attending Riverland Community College in Austin for two years, he was very involved in theater. At SSU, he participates in concert choir and is vice president of the SSU Chemistry Club. Other interests include intramural softball, chess and racquetball.

And Schwartz is still goofing around with the states of solid and liquid, only instead of cornstarch and water, he now makes birds, dogs and flowers out of glass.