Welcome to Willamette

Jeff Weber ’10 was raised to be a biologist. His biologist parents introduced him to microscopes at a young age, and dinner conversations revolved around family concerns like state health issues (his mom) and the restoration of Montana’s rivers (his dad).

His own foray into science took place at a lab in Montana, a state strewn with Superfund sites. Weber tested heavy metal concentrations in water, fish, soil and blood samples as a summer intern. When mines close down, he says, they leave diminished towns and sites laced with toxic heavy metals. “The mines are a huge issue.”

At Willamette, Weber’s instinctual love of math emerged, and he also found himself gravitating toward chemistry, rather than biology. “As far as my parents are concerned, I’ve committed a small act of treason,” he grins. “But I like math, and it has more practical applications to chemistry than biology.”

His act of treason has paid off — in a big way. Weber just received a prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, which supports math and science students who demonstrate outstanding potential. He is now a math/chemistry double major, hoping to find intersections between the two fields.

“Pure math is all theory,” Weber says. “I’m interested in applying abstract mathematics to analysis of chemical structures and to specific questions in science. It’s cool to know what will happen before it happens, and to explain processes with concepts that don’t have anything to do with our everyday lives. For example, mathematicians use imaginary numbers in a very abstract way — such numbers, after all, are called ‘imaginary’ — but it turns out that a lot of scientific applications need imaginary numbers to arrive at solutions.