Jurchen delves into chemical world

Take a walk to the lab with chemistry professor Dr. John Jurchen of Concordia University in Seward, and he’ll introduce you to everyone he meets on the way.

Inside, he’ll have you safely sniff a clear liquid by the name of cyclohexane; it’ll be so foul you’ll make a face.

“It’s an awful smell, but also quite unforgettable,” Jurchen said.

Most notably, when you leave, he’ll point to class photos from years of chemistry students he’s taught and list off what each graduate is doing with their lives now.

How does he remember it all?

“That’s who we are,” Jurchen said. “That’s what we do.”

It’s hard to forget people you’ve taken on classroom adventures.

Jurchen imagines education in terms of exploring underground galleries. The caves near the entrance might be well-developed, walked before by man but still beautiful.

As you go farther and deeper, you’ll find more interesting specimens, and the spelunking gets harder.

But where Jurchen can’t go, maybe his former students will venture.

“In my particular view, the galleries go on forever, and it’s my pleasure to walk with students as far as we can through these galleries,” Jurchen said. “A few of my students will eventually end up in graduate school, and they’ll be taking people through tours of their own in other parts of galleries that I may never be able to see.”

The main cave he explores, so to speak, is combusting molecules into pieces, or physical chemistry.

In Jurchen’s words he would be in the chemistry version of Harry Potter’s Slytherin house.

He assigns all four branches of chemistry to their own respective house from the popular fiction series.

For the curious: organic chemistry is Gryffindor, inorganic is Ravenclaw and analytical is Hufflepuff.

Since Jurchen also has training in mass spectrometry, which deals with analytical chemistry, he possesses Hufflepuff traits as well.

Slytherins and Ravenclaws must get along well, then, because Jurchen shares an office with his wife, Dr. Kristy Jurchen, who’s an inorganic chemistry professor.

Inorganic chemists build things with everything that isn’t carbon.

“She would make stuff and I would break stuff,” Jurchen said. “That defines a lot of our household relationship.”

When two chemists talk about their passion at the dinner table, their children are bound to pick up on a few things.

The kids are both still in elementary school, but perhaps there’s already another chemistry professor in the making.

“Our poor children are a lost cause,” Jurchen said. “When my youngest daughter was just learning how to walk, she would take one of our huge textbooks into the closet and say that she was teaching college students. [It] was her ‘chemis-twee’ book. It was one of the first words she said.”

Chemistry isn’t the only cave Jurchen explores.

Instrumental music is a big part of his life, plus he writes fiction for fun and for the reading enjoyment of his students.

If one isn’t writing for others to read, “why else write?” Jurchen asked.

His fiction writings focus on a genre that he enjoys, which is epic science fantasy.

His pages are heavily footnoted with details of math and science, so it sometimes happens that they get brought up in class to help with student attention.

One of the upsides to artistic endeavors is that words can paint pictures for visual learning.

“If you can come at things with angles of pictures and angles of stories, for the students that read these, I hope that provides a deeper experience in the world of science as well,” Jurchen said.

As he finishes writing the third of a three-part trilogy, Jurchen expects only a few of his current students to want to read it.

Someday, he hopes it might be accessible to all students at Concordia. After all, the characters should be strikingly familiar to them.

“I wanted my characters to be good,” Jurchen said. “I’m modeling them after sort of typical Concordia students. They’re just simply the kind of people that you and I would want to know and be friends with.”

The characters in his novels, in addition to being good people, also have an understanding of both Christian theology and science, which is a reflection of the author who created them.

Jurchen considers himself a “theologian of the first article,” and a major part of his mission in life is to consider what it means to him that God made the heavens and the earth.

What is really beneficial about being a Christian and a scientist, he said, is that he can use God’s gifts to help other people.

An example of this in the world of chemistry is the relatively recent discovery of a drug which is helping many people deal with pain.

It started as the illegal narcotic fentanyl, but chemists have found a way to create fluorinated fentanyl, allowing the drug to become useful as a prescribed medicine.

“If you can find a way to take what’s a dangerous street drug and make it more active in the peripheral nervous system where it can do some benefit in terms of reducing pain, rather than just only acting in the central nervous system in the brain,” Jurchen said, “what a blessing that can be.”

What Jurchen does every day is not just a job. It’s not just a profession, either. It’s a vocation and a passion, and he believes he can help students find their callings, as well.

Jurchen’s lab tour wraps up on the lawn right outside his office, where he beams with pride as he points to towering steel girders.

When finished, the structure will be the Dunklau Center for Science, Math and Business.

Soon, he’ll be leading students on even more adventures with brand new lab spaces. It is what he’s meant to do.

“In my philosophy of education, it’s this mutual exploration where we’re on this journey together,” Jurchen said. “I love visiting all of the galleries; they’re all interesting. And I recognize that my students will have different gifts and different vocational aspirations, and so some of them will go deeper in and some less deep, but we can explore this beauty in all of them.”