Contact:	Jason Gil Bear, 277-5813
June 5, 2002 UNM GRADUATE STUDENT SELECTED TO ATTEND A MEETING OF NOBEL LAUREATES IN GERMANY IN JULY Nouvelle Gebhart, a third year graduate student in chemistry, will join more than 30 students from across the country who have shown outstanding talent in chemistry and introduce them to Nobel prize recipients in chemistry at a meeting of Nobel Laureates at Lindau, Germany in July. Gebhart said she was nominated to represent UNM by Martin Kirk, professor of chemistry and UNM President Bill Gordon. The nominations were sent to the U.S. Department of Energy and a panel chose 30 students who were notified in January. Gebhart said she was ecstatic to learn that she was chosen to attend the meeting and said she has always been interested in chemistry. "My father is a metallurgical engineer and ever since I was little he would bring things home from work that would pique my interest in science," Gebhart said. She said she looks forward to meeting the Nobel laureates because she is interested to know why the scientists decided to research and study the areas that they won their awards. In addition to attending the meeting in July, Gebhart is currently working on two projects and is set to begin an internship at Los Alamos National Labs this fall. "The first involves materials and computational chemistry. I study the electronic structure of valence tautomers with spectroscopic experiments and density functional theory calculations," she said. "The second project involves creating a computer program to predict the magnetic susceptibility of single molecule magnets." Gebhart said she wants to either continue working in research for a national lab or begin a teaching career after graduation. When she is not in class or the research lab, Gebhart enjoys reading, rock climbing and playing tennis. Gebhart was born in Kettering, Ohio and is the daughter of James Gebhart III. ###

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