The Diatomic Trio
Earning three degrees – with a little help from his friends

It’s been a long journey for Clayton Jeffries. He went from years of work as a carpet cleaner for his dad’s business in Bend to earning three OSU degrees – a bachelor’s, master’s and soon a doctorate in chemical engineering – while helping to create breakthroughs in using diatoms, a single-celled marine life form, in devices with electronic or biological applications.

But he wouldn’t have gotten there without a little help from his friends – the professors who believed in his talents, fellow students who shared their knowledge and even younger students whom he now tries to help as a mentor in his own right.

“We all pull each other up.”
“Guidance and mentoring are just so important,” says Jeffries, who always liked science, but didn’t even start college until five years after graduating from Redmond High School. “Your professors help lay out goals, you work closely with your fellow students, and when you get far enough along, you try to give back, help younger students. We all pull each other up.”

Greg Rorrer, a professor of chemical engineering, echoes those sentiments.

“We create the concepts, help guide our students and get the funding, but we’d be nowhere without the talents of people like Clayton,” Rorrer says. “They have a strong work ethic, youthful energy and the ability to work with and learn from their professors and peers. This is really no place for a loner.”

Rorrer and associate professor Alex Chang are making exciting advances in the use of diatoms, marine life forms that might be biologically fabricated into solar cells to produce electricity. They show promise as unique biological sensors to detect immune disease. And their shells have been incorporated into microelectronic devices to manipulate broad-spectrum light. With support of a $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, their research on diatoms has produced 11 publications – just in the past year.

“We need to scale up these systems to larger applications and test their reliability,” Chang says. “But some projects, especially the biological sensors, are getting pretty close. And we wouldn’t be making these advances without all of our students, who have such a passion for their work.”

Jeffries says he may move eventually to the private sector or agency research.

“This bridge between biology and material science is very interesting, and there’s still so much we need to learn,” Jeffries says. “I may go into private research, but I don’t ever want to leave behind the type of mentoring that exists at OSU. I want to keep doing that.”