CSI Clarkson
CSI Clarkson
Written by Robert Snow, Courier Observer
It was shaping up to be a happy birthday on Cherry Lane for the son of Jennifer Patnode as she readied a cake, set the table and piled her son’s presents in the center.
While the children played at her neighbor’s home, it happened: one of the gifts she was holding exploded sending a salvo of nails and shrapnel through the air, one penetrating Patnode’s neck. Paramedics declared the woman dead at the scene.
When Clarkson University first-year chemistry students arrived on the scene, the body had already been taken away. Now it was up to the students to figure out exactly what happened and who was responsible by extracting evidence from the mock crime scene for testing it in the laboratory.
Eleanor Wade collected blood samples by the chalk outline of where Patnode’s body had been found. Nearby, one of her classmates and co-investigators collects the debris from the blast and dusts suspicious objects.
Wade is one of dozens of Clarkson students taking Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Director of Freshman Chemistry James Peploski’s first-year chemistry course. Part introduction to chemistry, part crime scene investigation, the course teaches basic and even advanced principles of chemistry within the real-world framework of forensic science and analysis. It is one of the University’s most popular classes.
“I’ve been teaching the class for about six years now and it has been a big hit with our students,” explains Peploski. “By acting as actual crime scene investigators, they learn important science in a way that fully engages them. It’s an active approach that facilitates the development of chemistry skills needed in the real world.”
According to Peploski, the course is designed to create a peer learning environment where the students learn from each other by asking questions and making connections. “I always give the students more work than any one person can do so they must really work as a team and divide up the work,” he says.
Meanwhile, across the basement of Snell Hall where five different mock scenes were set up over two days, another body was found but the circumstances leading up to death are not conclusive. At first glance it looks like an explosion and fire in a drug lab killed the victim. But Clarkson student Abdulmajid Mohammed isn’t so sure. He points out that a chemistry book on the desk in the lab is opened to a page about nicotine and the white powdery substance on the scales could be harmless baking soda.
His co-investigator Eric Hernandez shares his doubts. “I am not sure that the fire caused his death,” Hernandez says. “We are trying to figure out how broken glass and traces of blood we’ve found elsewhere tie into the burnt body.”
Donning rubber gloves, Mohammed, Hernandez and the other members of their crime scene investigation unit carefully collect the evidence. They will spend the next three weeks in the laboratory testing and retesting the evidence to determine the cause of death and who is responsible.
“Each group has its own crime scene, own set of evidence and laboratory techniques they will have to use,” explains Peploski. “For every piece of evidence there is a hierarchy of tests the students can perform from very simple to more complex.
This semester’s crime scenes were developed by students who attended the class the previous year, including sophomore Adam Ruskin. In the case he investigated last year, a man was poisoned then his house set on fire to hide the crime. What made it difficult, according to Ruskin, wasn’t only the confusing circumstances of the victim’s death, but the complex, sensitive lab equipment that he and his fellow students needed to use to solve it.
“It was a great experience,” Ruskin recalls. It was also an experience that proved valuable beyond the semester. Last summer Ruskin worked for a pharmaceutical company where he used many of the same diagnostic machines he’d used to solve his mock case.