Chase Beisel: Marching to a Different Drum Line
Ask Chase Beisel to describe himself in twenty-five words or less, and he responds: "I’m the kind of guy who likes to hit things."
Before you run for cover, the things Chase enjoys "hitting" are his books and the drums. And he’s hit the road a few times as well: born in Detroit, he’s lived in Baltimore, Atlanta, Rochester, MN, and, most recently, Omaha before landing in Ames.
Iowa State wasn’t a difficult choice, Chase says. Besides the solid reputation of the ISU College of Engineering’s academic programs, there were other attributes that caught his attention. "Other schools couldn’t offer nearly as good a support package as Iowa State," says the senior ChE major, who also has minors in biochemistry and math. He was likewise impressed with the marching band program—especially the drum line, of which he is a leading member.
The National Merit scholar has come a long way since graduating from Omaha Creighton Prep in 2000. He’s already served an internship with Abbott Labs in Chicago, and last summer did research at Creighton University, where his father teaches endocrinology on the medical school faculty.
Chase admits that he’s traveled some distance as well from his original notions of chemical engineering. "My concept of chemical engineering back in high school was completely different from what a chemical engineer actually does," he acknowledges. "I thought, ‘they do stuff with chemicals, and it’s involved with engineering’—and that’s it!"
Despite his early misunderstanding of the work, though, there was never much doubt in Chase’s mind where his interests would take him. "Engineering interested me because I was good at math, and I wanted something more applied than straight theory or things beyond my knowledge," he continues. "And I enjoyed high school chemistry. Take the two and plop them together: you get chemical engineering."
Currently, Chase works in the lab of his mentor, ChE Professor Jackie Shanks, researching gossypol, a toxin specific to cotton that functions as an insecticide. Gossypol can be digested by certain ruminants, but not by humans, Chase observes, and he’s trying to determine the molecular structure of the toxin using molecular modeling computer programs. His hard work has paid off: in December his honors poster was awarded first place by the Engineering Honors Committee.
After a stopover with the ChE department’s program in Oviedo, Spain this summer, the next thing Chase will be hitting is graduate school. Although research and teaching at the university level are real possibilities, he’s also taking a serious look at the pharmaceutical industry. Right now he’s looking at MIT or the University of California, San Diego, for bioengineering programs, as well as Cal Tech, Northwestern, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Texas at Austin.
