Researcher of the Month
October 2007
Mitchell Fourman
History & Political Science major, Honors College, Class of '08
Research Mentors: Dr. Michael Barnhart, History; Dr. Richard Clark, Biomedical Engineering; Dr. Thomas Hemmick, Physics & Astronomy; Dr. Howard Lavine and Dr. Frank Myers, Political Science; Dr. Iwao Ojima, Chemistry; and Dr. Miriam Rafailovich, Materials Science & Engineering
17th century poet John Milton is said to have been the "last man to know everything." * But Mitch Fourman, is going to give it the old college try! While engaging in such
diverse pursuits as viola, fencing, jiu jitsu, and crew, and serving as a volunteer
EMS and fire responder, and double majoring in in History and Political Science, all the while participating in a host
of student clubs & organizations, Mitch is broadening his experiences and knowledge
at a prodigious clip! And his intellectual curiosity is refreshingly hard to satisfy! 
At Stony Brook alone, he's worked with the research groups of: Dr. Miriam Rafailovich in Materials
Science; Dr. Richard Clark in Biomedical Engineering; Dr.Iwao Ojima in Chemistry;
and Dr. Thomas Hemmick in Physics & Astronomy. Targeted research foci range from supercritical
fluids; to tubercolosis and anti-cancer toxin research; to educational nuclear physics
outreach projects using theVan de Graff and tandem accelerators. With funding from
an NSF-Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Program (2005), Mitch worked
the summer after freshman year on hydrogen fuel cells with Dr. Jay Benziger and Dr. Andrew
Bocarsley at Princeton's Center for Complex Materials. He also spent a semester studying
abroad at Magdalen College, Oxford (fall 2005), studying with Dr. Hazel Assunder and
G.H.L. LeMay, Emeritus Fellow of Worcester College. Currently Mitch is working on
thesis projects in the humanities with Dr. Michael Barnhart in History, and Dr. Howard
Lavine and Dr. Frank Myers in Political Science while also completing his senior capstone
project in the Honors College with his long-time mentor, Prof. Rafailovich.
Mitch Fourman's passion for research and discovery certainly stands out. But his many
accomplishments also include securing the Benjamin Scharps Legal Essay contest (2007);
being selected for USA Today's All-Academic Third Team; (2007); receiving the 2005-2006 Barry
Goldwater Scholarship; being inducted into the National Gallery of Young Inventors (2005);
receiving a Howard Hughes Medical Fellowship (Summer 2005); serving as a Stony Brook
Student Ambassador; and being honored with the Undergraduate Recognition Award for
Outstanding Academic Achievement, twice. Mitch is a member of the Stony Brook Volunteer
Fire Departmentas an EMS and Fire Responder (2006-2007). And he was founding president
of the Stony Brook Fencing Teams (2005-2006); is currently president of Stony Brook
Crew (2007); and vice president of the Stony Brook Tau Beta Pi Engineering Society
(2006-2008); participated in the 2004-2005 National College Bowl Team; and has served
four years as an undergraduate representative on Stony Brook Alumni's Board of Directors.
Mitch has presented work at the on-campus URECA research Celebration and the Northeast
Biotechnology Conference (2007), and given poster and oral presentations at the American
Physical Society meetings (2003, 2004). To date, he has 4 patents, involving his work
with supercritical carbon dioxide.
What also really stands out in Mitch's impressive list of activities is how absolutely
dedicated he is to mentoring. Working with Prof. Rafailovich and the staff at Garcia
Center's Polymers at Engineered Interfaces, Mitch has helped mentor over a dozen high
school students, including Intel and Siemens Westinghouse semifinalists. He himself
got hooked on doing research while still in high school, working under the tutelage
of Prof. Rafailovich through the Garcia Center's Research Scholar program (2002),
and again the following summer through a Simons Fellowship (2003). Born in Pittsburgh
PA, Mitch Fourman has been a long time resident of the Stony Brook environs: he attended
the local Ward Melville HS where he participated in the exceptional INSTAR science
research program. Following graduation from Stony Brook next spring, Mitch plans to
complete a one-year master's program on military history at Oxford prior to returning
to Stony Brook to enter the School of Medicine. When asked about the amount he has
packed into his four years of college here at SBU, Mitch replies:
I keep hearing about people who say "I wish I could have done this as an undergrad
or tried that." This is the best 4 years of a human's life. Undergrad is where you
define yourself as human being. .. If you don't try a little bit of everything, then
you can't possibly know about which parts you like, which parts you don't. So I'm
trying to broaden as much as I can. And as soon as I find something I really like,
I just latch on, and see how far it takes me. Below are some excerpts shared from
his interview with Karen Kernan, URECA Director.
Karen:You've been involved in research in a number of areas. What's been your primary research
focus?
Mitch: Dr. Miriam Rafailovich in Materials Science is going to be my advisor for my Honors
College thesis. I've been with her since high school. The topic is: optimization of
polymer blends and compounds using supercritical carbon dioxide. It's a nice summary
of the primary focus of my work over the past 6 years, which has been a single polymer
blend and trying to bring qualities to two very cheap polymers that usually you would
have to pay quite a bit more in order to get. The process is environmentally friendly,
very easy to promote. . . makes people happy!
What's it like working with Prof. Rafailovich?
Miriam always taught one very important thing. It was never about the grants for her,
never about the money. It was, what do you think is wrong and how can we fix it? Research's
ultimate goal is to benefit society. . . And she is an incredible, untiring woman!
She's been such an influence on me. She puts that lust for research, that passion
into you, and once you get that, you never quite walk away.
What first attracted you to doing research? What keeps you involved?
I love it! The best way to put it, I think, is that research is the facilitator by
which quality of life improves. I don't want to be just someone who benefits from
research. I want to be someone who actually creates a lot of things that we benefit
from. The civil service component of it attracts me. As it turns out, one of the things
I enjoyed most was not while I was a student, but when I got to start teaching students
of my own. I started mentoring right before my freshman year. I took on my first student,
John Michael Iraci. My next two years, I averaged ~2-3 students a year. This year
I took on 9!
You've also had some experience in the non-sciences, right?
The experience at Oxford really started everything off. At Oxford, you have a teacher
that sits opposite you, you're the only one in the room, and it's all one on one.
At the end of every tutorial (we had one a week) my teacher would walk up to his big
wall of books, scan for the right one, select a thousand page volume, and say: "Read
this and write 20 pages and tell me what you think." I learned so much. And now I'm
getting to delve into humanities research here at SBU too, working with two great
people, Prof. Michael Barnhart in History on a topic along the lines of whether had
Kennedy not been assassinated, would Viet Nam have occurred in the way that it did.
The other thesis project is in political science with Prof. Frank Myers. . . analyzing
what the psychological and contemporary differences are between patriotism and terrorism
as an act.
These research topics will also involve going to a few other libraries too. That's
the beauty of it. You travel around. The more collections you go to, the more people
you end up speaking to, the more perspectives you gain on the topic. It'll be an interesting
run. I'm really looking forward to it. And anyone who thinks it's any easier than
science because you're not playing with chemicals is completely off-base. You don't
play with chemicals but you play with primary sources, which can be almost as corrosive!
Tell me about your own teaching and mentoring experiences.
My best day of research actually wasn't a research day. It was the LISEF awards ceremony
in 2007. At the awards ceremony, three of my students had advanced to the finals round.
Steve Benay, who was a Simons Fellow, and Danielle Lent and Emily Levine who were
competing as a team. I was in the back row and they started to call them up in reverse
order. . . Steve got second place atLISEF. That was great! Then they called up the team, and Danielle and Emily came up and
they were first place! It was really exciting. . . and it made me happy knowing something
I did had an impact on someone. Later, at ISEF the team won a $25,000 award from Ricoh. Just seeing the look of glee on their faces
…made me feel really great to have been a part of all that came about.
Science awards and competitions are big in Long Island. And you yourself come from
a very well known high school with a strong record in science. Did this put a lot
of pressure on you as a student?
Ward Melville was a great place! But the one drawback, my year particularly, was that
the level of competition was so fierce, back-stabbing and cut-throat. . . that one
was very split upon doing something they loved vs something they knew would get into
them into Harvard. Because of that level of fierceness, many of my classmates had
a very hard time to adjust in college afterwards. And for me too, Stony Brook freshman
year was hard. Freshman year was a big, rude awakening for me. I had to mature.
The way to succeed in college is not to keep on thinking it's an issue of you doing
better than the next guy. . . The fact is, you're never going to do better than the
next guy. You need to just focus on managing yourself, and allow life to take you
for what it is. . . What Stony Brook shows me, is that there are incredible human
beings on this earth, and they are all over the place. It's not an issue of who's
going to be exceptional. Everyone is in themselves. More important is what you make
of it, what you do when you graduate . . .
You're involved with all these research projects, involved with multiple organizations,
sports, music. How do you balance time with academics? What sacrifices do you make?
How difficult is it for you?
It's still something I haven't gotten quite good at. Ask my ex-girlfriends! They'd
tell you, I had no time at all! The fact of it is, you have to keep your priorities
straight. The number #1 priority is going to be school. Unfortunately I had to learn
the hard way. I had a couple of semesters where that wasn't my number one. With research, you have to make sure that you can give the commitment
when you can. . . Once you understand what time you need to do research, what time
you need for your classes, you can develop a healthy balance. If you manage to take
your classes seriously, research is only a benefit. There isn't any negative thing
to doing research.
What qualities, in your opinion, do you need to be a good researcher? What makes for
a good scientist?
It's patience. You need to have patience, a want to understand, and an ability to
think that sometimes the closest way to get somewhere isn't a straight line. Research
in itself is never straightforward. The other half of the battle is understanding
what it is you're looking at . . .being able to segregate your research into domains
that make sense, domains that aren't spectacularly broad, but domains that are manageable.
Maybe I don't need to evaluate 300 angles at once, maybe it's just this single one
that matters right now.
It's a mistake to jump in on research, thinking, I'm going to cure cancer and invent
the environmentally clean rocket tomorrow. If that was the case, I'm sure Dr. Hemmick
would have done it far faster than any of us could! But if one has the patience to
say, I'm not going to change the world tomorrow but if I work today, tomorrow and
next year, I might be able to work a little bit towards it. That's the best way to
go about it.
Patience has been a quality other students have mentioned too. Do you have a story
about not getting results? or having a frustrating day of research?
Miriam has this tendency in her labs of getting some of the oldest equipment on earth.
. . probably literally was older than my parents! …A machine we worked with was a
C.W. Brabender. And one day, this machine successfully blew out completely. "BOOM!",
a thick glass window pops out of the machine! Well we have two more, I thought. By
the end of the afternoon, the other two were destroyed too! What with the shards of
glass, the machine smoking on the back side of the room. . . I told the others in
my group, "Let's go home. This just isn't our day to do work." It was the day before
the final presentation. And it was a big deal that we didn't have that day's work.
What we did instead, though, was to take a picture of the machines. We put a label
on the side saying: "Don't let this happen to you!"
But that wasn't even the worst story. One time, on an osteoblast growth project… one
of my students omitted the [critical] instruction that said you need to leave your
sample in a vacuum oven for 6 hours to sterilize.. The result was, we contaminated
everyone's sample in the incubator that day which was about 14 projects! I felt horrible.
Tell me about presenting your work.
I've had abstracts go to the American Physical Society, three of them. In 2004, I
gave an oral presentation up in Montreal. It was the day after my LISEF competition.
I was nervous. I'd never had trouble speaking, but my hands were shaking…. The one
thing that lightened me was when the moderator got up and said, The next speaker …is
Mitch Fourman from Ward Melville…[pause] High School? … I did the presentation. And
I must have stuttered. . But afterwards, the scientist from Europe who spoke before
me and was an expert in the field, walked up to me, patted me on the shoulder and
said "You're alright kid! You have a future!"
And how about on-campus. What was the URECA research day like for you?
URECA was a great experience too. You get a lot of professors going around. And students
who'd never done research before. High school students were there showing posters.
There were people who knew very little about this campus who walked away from the
event, thinking this is an incredible place, you're not going to see this somewhere
else.They were really impressed. It's true too. At other universities I know of, doing
research can be very regulated. It's not the case here. Stony Brook is the place where
you can do whatever you want. This is the most open experience . . .
Do you like explaining your work to people not in the same field?
When you give your presentation, you can fall into using big words, like polymerization,
supercritical enhancement, bulk foaming. But if you look at the audience and get a
blank stare, which translates as "I have no idea what you just said for the last 15
moments" . . . you need to adapt. Talk as if you're a midwestern salesman. Talk very
simply, convey your message, and that's the end of that. Instead of talking about
polymers, you say, "Look, what type of things do you want out of the perfect plastic?
Do you want something flexible, something strong? Great, This is what we did…." If
I can help get my audience knowing what a supercritical fluid and nothing else, I've
done something.
Certain people have helped instill speaking skills too. Frank Myer's leadership and
rhetoric class was tremendous. It teaches you the ways you need to speak, the ways
to convey words. It's helped me a good deal!
How valuable, would you say, is it to have a summer experience vs. doing research
during the year?
The #1 thing with research is, if you do something over the summer, that's a really
beneficial thing. Because when you're doing it during the year, whether you like it
or not, you're not able to work more than 3 days a week. Because the fact is, we all
have lives, relationships, commitments. During the summer, it's a different thing
because it's now a full time job. When you have that experience of having research
as a job and not just as a facet of your academic experience, then that gives you
a lot of insight as to whether this is the type of thing you'd want to do, whether
you have the patience, that ability. And really, whether you go into law, engineering,
medicine, you are going to end up doing research in your life. You may as well figure
out as much as you can now.
Plus, the real end of it is that if you love research, you're going to end up loving
so much what you do that you're going to stick with it. Some realize this isn't for
me but I like the experience. If you [merely] enjoy research, you're going to bounce
from topic to topic until something really, really sticks. That's been a lot of me
although I've stayed with materials science consistently for six years now.
Research ultimately helps you figure out what you will end up doing, what career is
right for you. It's the greatest way of narrowing your search. And you walk out with
experiences, with maturity. You walk out with patience.
What advice would you give to other students regarding research opportunities?
Don't wait for someone to offer it to you. Take it for yourself. Don't wait for someone
to say, "Do you want to work with me?" Chances are, someone else has asked. You're
not going to get that question. Look on the internet. Look at professors' websites.
Look for words that make you excited. Don't wait for it because if you wait for it,
it's never going to come, and you're going to lose that chance.
You've certainly managed to pack a lot of experiences, research and otherwise, into
your 4 years!
I figure. . . I keep hearing about people who say "I wish I could have done this as
an undergrad or tried that." This is the best 4 years of a human's life. Undergrad
is where you define yourself as human being, not necessarily your career but where
you define your personality, your outlook on everything. If you don't try a little
bit of everything, then you can't possibly know about which parts you like, which
parts you don't. So I'm trying to broaden as much as I can. And as soon as I find
something I really like, I just latch on, and see how far it takes me.