Katelynn Humphrey ’25 could have taken the easier route, attending college close to her home in East Burke, Vermont. But she wanted something different — and a challenge.
“I have lived in Vermont my whole life, two minutes down the road from my grandparents. My ancestor was the founder of our town, so my family has been there for generations,” Humphrey says.
She chose Clark — four hours away from her tightly knit family, including seven siblings — because, she says, “I just really wanted to know what it would be like if I went somewhere unfamiliar. I never even had visited Worcester until I showed up here with a car full of stuff.”
Now Humphrey is graduating this May with a major in chemistry and minor in biochemistry. She can boast nearly two years of experience in the research lab of Julio D’Arcy, the Carl J. and Anna Carlson Endowed Chair and assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry; poster presentations at two ClarkFest undergraduate research events; and the American Institute of Chemists Award for 2025.
However, life at Clark wasn’t always easy for Humphrey, who initially felt isolated from her family and struggled with her first chemistry courses.
But then she adjusted, learning how to rely on her peers and connecting with “a wide breadth of people” from different backgrounds and experiences. She found friends in new places — through the Mycology Club she co-founded with her roommate, Devon Rose Leaver ’24, M.S. ’25, and via their rock-climbing trips, and through the D’Arcy Lab in the Gustaf H. Carlson School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
“When I couldn’t access my family in Vermont, I had almost a new family away from home,” she says. “That sort of comfort has been really valuable for me.”
As for academics, Humphrey found her first chemistry class — an accelerated, introductory version that combined two semesters into one — intense.
“It didn’t necessarily come easy to me, but that was one of the things that I liked the most about it,” she says. “I kept getting beat down, and I still wanted to come back.”
Organic chemistry — a course that many students fear — also gave her trouble. But instead of quitting, she signed up again, this time for the advanced segment.
“I studied harder than I’ve ever studied before, and I found different ways that worked for me,” says Humphrey, who tapped into student services that broadened her perspective on how she learns best. “And once I surrendered to that, I really started enjoying it.”
In the next two chemistry classes — Biochemistry 1 with Professor Don Spratt and Applied Electrochemistry with D’Arcy — she did even better, finally realizing how much she loved chemistry, especially the hands-on research in the “materials and energy storage side of chemistry.”
The summer after her junior year, Humphrey received the James ’39 & Ada Bickman Summer Science Research Internship fellowship to support her work in the D’Arcy Lab. In addition, D’Arcy’s $500,000, five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award, “Manufacturing Semiconducting Nanoparticles at the Aerosol/Vapor-Phase Interface,” has helped support the research by Humphrey and other undergraduate and Ph.D. students in his lab. D’Arcy and his team study synthetic polymers — complex, chemically bonded chains of large molecules — used to produce materials for a wide range of applications, from energy storage devices to atmospheric water collection.
‘I could talk on and on about the research’
When Humphrey’s family would ask what she was doing in the lab, she would start to explain her research projects, with titles like “Oxidative Radical Polymerization of 3,4-Ethylenedioxythiophene” and “Aerosol Vapor Polymerization Synthesis of Poly(3,4-Ethylenedioxythiophene).”
“My family usually stopped me before I got too far into describing it,” Humphrey says. “I could talk on and on about the research.”
At this spring’s ClarkFest, Humphrey and Umama Akther, the chemistry Ph.D. student with whom she worked, found themselves surrounded by fellow scientists interested in their project, and the research partners were happy to dive into it.
Humphrey explained how the team, under D’Arcy’s mentorship, builds customized nebulizers to produce aerosolized droplets of ferric chloride, which are carried via fans into reactors. The researchers in D’Arcy’s lab aim to use this “aerosol vapor polymerization” process to mix with a monomer — a small, simple molecule, in this case, 3,4-Ethylenedioxythiophene — and produce PEDOT particles, which can then be optimized. PEDOT is short for Poly(3,4-Ethylenedioxythiophene), which is a polymer.
“PEDOT is a really versatile substance,” according to Humphrey. “It’s a highly conductive material, with significant applications in energy storage, atmospheric water harvesting, pH and temperature sensors, and solid-state composites like concrete. The polymer is noncytotoxic, which means it can be put into the body without causing harm and be used in medical devices.”
“There’s this level of excitement that Julio brings to the laboratory setting — he makes it feel very alive.”
— katelynn humphrey ’25
Humphrey’s project contributed to the D’Arcy Lab’s research aimed at “making this highly processable powder that can be used in any application you’d like,” she explains. “It can be put into paints or printing ink, through which you could conduct electricity.”
In the lab, Humphrey says, she benefited from a working environment that D’Arcy purposefully promoted: safe, collaborative, and engaging.
“There’s this level of excitement that Julio brings to the laboratory setting — he makes it feel very alive,” she says. “There’s constantly something new that we have to fix or some problem that we have to solve, and I love being able to tease those apart and find a solution for them.”
Her experience, she says, has cemented her desire to find a research-and-development position in a chemistry or biochemistry lab, then attend graduate school.
“I never thought I was capable of learning as much as I did,” Humphrey says. “I was challenged academically through rigorous courses and then also challenged socially by connecting with people from various backgrounds.”
Her years at Clark, four hours from home, have been “almost like a close-range test,” Humphrey says. “Now I know that if I were to go further from my family, I’m capable of starting over again.”
