Karl S. Booksh supercharges chemical measurements

If you come to Karl S. Booksh at the University of Delaware with an interesting chemistry problem, he might strike up a partnership to help you solve it. “I’m a Southerner at heart,” he says, born and raised in Louisiana. And in the Deep South, “you get to know somebody, and if you like them, you can find a way to collaborate,” he says.

The strategy has proven fruitful for the chemometrician. Using chemometric models—machine learning algorithms built and interpreted using chemical knowledge—Booksh has probed questions in a variety of disciplines. He hops from field to field “just based upon what sort of fun collaborator I have.”

These days, one of Booksh’s projects is a collaboration with the US Forest Service to develop a model to trace the origins of timber with handheld spectroscopic sensors. And, with another collaborator, Booksh is developing a way to analyze scanning electron microscope images “to divine chemical composition based upon shapes of inclusions in nanoparticles.”

“One of the things I find interesting about Karl is that over the course of his career, he’s been able to reinvent himself a few times,” says Barry Lavine, a computational chemist at Oklahoma State University and one of Booksh’s past and current collaborators. This ability to change gears is something Lavine sees as key to success. “Karl’s been very good at that,” he adds.

Booksh began his path into chemometrics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks as a National Merit Scholar working in an analytical chemistry lab. “Then, during reading week [freshman year], I broke my neck in flag football,” he says. Because of the injury, Booksh experiences full paralysis in his legs and partial paralysis in his arms.

After a summer of rehab, where Booksh learned to use a wheelchair, his academic adviser got him back in the lab but with a greater focus on analyzing data, rather than collecting it. “I basically realized that I wasn’t going to have a career as a bench chemist,” Booksh says. “Fortunately, I like math, like statistics, and that was where I could make a good contribution.”

Still, the young chemist needed to attend labs for class. It was before the US Congress passed the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, but another student had broken his back recently, and the chemistry department already had ramps available for Booksh to use. “They would just move the ramp and the platform to whatever lab I was using so I could work on bench chemistry,” Booksh says. And when he ran experiments, Booksh used the university’s only set of battery-operated electronic pipettes.

After graduating, Booksh went to the University of Washington in Seattle for his PhD, where he learned chemometrics from Bruce R. Kowalski, one of the discipline’s founding scientists. But Booksh spent no time in the lab collecting data. So, as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of South Carolina, he wanted to focus on learning spectroscopy. And when he started his independent career, he decided his research would use “chemometrics as a guiding theory on how to make instrumentation.”

“What we’re doing a lot of now is LIBS [laser induced breakdown spectroscopy] with handheld chemical sensors,” Booksh says. The portable devices allow scientists to collect environmental spectra from far and wide. Then Booksh’s group uses chemometrics to identify where interesting samples, worthy of more in-depth analysis, might exist.

Eventually Booksh realized he didn’t know any other tenured faculty at R1 research universities who had gone through the higher education system with a disability. Yet data show that many students with disabilities are interested in research, he says. Booksh attributes the discrepancy to a lack of role models and limited infrastructure to accommodate students early in their studies and prevent them from falling behind their peers. He wanted to shore up those channels.

So in 2016, Booksh collaborated with his colleague Sharon Rozovsky to officially launch a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program at UD focused on getting students with disabilities into research labs. The experience would help the young scientists determine if they wanted to pursue research and develop the tools they needed to succeed in graduate school, Booksh adds.

Through the REU, the students also had the opportunity to connect with Booksh and each other. “The group dynamics was very important for us, so we met every week for 2 h to discuss topics that were solely about disability,” Rozovsky says. Booksh is an incredibly effective communicator, she says, “and it was very refreshing for them to hear somebody talking about the obstacles, when he was a full professor and very accomplished and very successful.”

But after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down labs across the country, getting the REU back up and running was challenging, Booksh says. The second grant funding the REU was ending, so Booksh decided to shift his focus toward research and being active in the Society for Applied Spectroscopy.

Even so, Booksh remembers the advice he preached to his REU students; he still tells it to students today. “Find out what your strengths are and make those strengths—the things you can do—as strong as possible. As long as other things aren’t fatal flaws, you will excel in your field,” he says.