Davies stresses importance of involving undergraduates in research

"How do you make UB stand out? That's one of the ways," he said. Davies sees undergraduate research as "a way of allowing individual interaction to occur in what is a very large university."

He brings the concern for involving undergraduates from Wake Forest University, where he was a professor of chemistry before coming to UB in 1995.

Four UB undergraduates currently are working in Davies' lab as part of his team of about a dozen-he has had more than 20 undergraduates as co-authors in past publications. Davies feels that research experience lets undergraduates develop skills for the chemistry job market.

"I have great fun teaching," emphasized Davies, who has developed special problem-solving sessions for his undergraduate students, "like a tutorial." At UB, he has used that approach both in a small class and in a large undergraduate class of about 200 students.

The opportunity to work in a more research-oriented program was the main attraction of UB for Davies, lead investigator for more than $1.9 million in grants, three from the National Institutes of Health and one from the National Science Foundation. And UB's new chemistry building and facilities definitely added to the advantages, he said.

His team has developed a method for making tropanes (chemical compounds that are very selective in their interactions with the central nervous system) that is very flexible, with the potential to target drug addiction and depression. The research may have implications for treating Alzheimer's disease.

Another offshoot for the tropane research is the possibility of developing diagnostic agents for various central nervous system diseases.

"It's a very practical chemistry, so that if it does work, we would plan for it to be very useful in many directions," Davies said.

"I used to have this philosophy that one should do research for around a three-year period in one area and then hopefully move into a fresh area and totally rejuvenate oneself," Davies said, "until I started a project in about 1985 that continued to blossom. We've continued to expand with it since then.

"We developed a rather esoteric little chemical reaction that turns out to have a lot of flexibility as far as what sort of compounds it can make," he said.

"In the drug abuse area, we found that our chemistry allowed us to make what looked like really valuable compounds in terms of potential medications for cocaine addiction that simply hadn't been made before and yet they seemed obvious ones...They've been very difficult to make," he said, but "using our chemistry, (the research) turned out to be very straightforward."

Davies' research groups are testing the tropane compounds. If they pass toxicology studies at NIH, then the next step could be clinical trials.

Davies said the move to UB had advantages beyond his professional life as a researcher and teacher. The move came with "perfect timing," since his children were nearing school age. "The school systems here are great, much better than North Carolina," he said.