Chemist Jixin Chen looked at the rapid spread of COVID-19 early in the pandemic and saw a novel opportunity for his kinetics lab, where they study the rates of reactions.
The first time he ran the lab in spring 2021, undergraduate students concluded that social regulations such as lockdowns, face masks and social distancing were effective ways to slow the speed of the spread of COVID. But they also discovered the limitations of modeling, noting that a large number of confirmed cases didn’t necessarily associate with an increasing rate of spread.
Students in the next lab wrote in a journal article on their experience that researchers should continue this work when infection and vaccination rate became significant.
And that’s just what happened. The spring 2022 lab students extended the mathematical model to make predictions on the rate of spread of COVID-19 in the United States with massive vaccination.
They also ran the model for the state of Ohio through fall 2022 — correctly predicting the upsurge in cases the state is experiencing at the end of summer.
The second group of lab students also wrote up their lab experience, this time seeing it published in the Journal of Chemical Education. All the students walked away from the lab with the requisites filled. But they also could add several lines to their resumes — for modeling software experience, data analysis skills, and a journal publication.
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