“I always like solving a puzzle that no one has ever solved before.”

Roger DeKock, an emeritus professor at Calvin College, has devoted a half century of his life to exploration, both in the classroom and in the lab.

And it’s a quest he’s not giving up in retirement. DeKock was selected as one of just five emeritus faculty nationwide to be part of the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation’s 2016 Senior Scientist Mentor Program. The prestigious award provides DeKock with a $20,000 grant that will support undergraduate research under his guidance.

“Many emeritus faculty no longer teach courses nor take on graduate students. Their wealth of experience and knowledge, however, makes them a unique and valuable educational resource for undergraduates,” said Mark Cardillo, executive director of the foundation. “This program provides for the development of a relationship where these senior scientists guide the students in perhaps their first research experience to generate new knowledge.”

A doorway to discovery

DeKock says that is why this award is so important, it enables more students to join the exploration and to see the value of research in discovering some aspect of God’s creation.

“Students best learn about research by doing it. It’s called research, because we don’t know what we’re doing … it’s the unknown and that can lead to frustration, but it can also lead to immense satisfaction,” said DeKock. “They pick up on things really rapidly. Instead of being a student, they are soon co-workers, they are helping to solve this puzzle and they get as excited about it as I do.”

DeKock says the majority of the $20,000 will fund one or two students each of the next two summers doing ten weeks of . The funding will also allow for the student(s) to work a few hours a week during the academic year to keep the research moving. DeKock says he is committed to meeting with the student every day during the summer and at least once a week during the academic year.

“I try to keep an ongoing relationship with the students, and I can keep the project moving,” said DeKock. “Because I’m retired I can spend my time writing for publication. They [the students] write internal reports for me, then I can take their internal reports and get them ready for publication, and they can see how it goes to that next step.”

Uncovering new knowledge

DeKock and his student(s) will be using this grant to continue his research into the electronic structure of atoms. In short, they are trying to understand at a deeper level the behavior of electrons in atoms. DeKock says they are coming up with qualitative concepts to help understand the chemical reactivity of one atom relative to another. Those insights he says, will be beneficial to chemists as they do their work.

And, in the meantime, the discovery continues, as DeKock and his student(s) are on an adventure, waiting for that “aha moment” that changes everything.

“When you figure it out [the puzzle] it’s just this level of satisfaction that you figured something out that nobody had ever thought of, and you are the first one in the whole world who had those thoughts,” said DeKock. “Then, it’s not just the satisfaction of figuring something out, but convincing others that you figured it out, and that’s where the publication comes in. And when you get people to actually reference your work after its published, that’s contributing to the wider scientific community.”

Other 2016 Senior Scientist Mentor Award recipients include: Edward Behrman, The Ohio State University; Phil Cruz, University of California, Santa Cruz; Peter H. von Hippel, University of Oregon, and Paul Wine, Georgia Institute of Technology.