Chemist Reacts Well With Students

Chemistry professor Dr. Stephen Contakes, who joined the Westmont faculty this fall, hopes to influence student’s lives inside and outside the classroom. The Lehigh University alumnus is a bioinorganic chemist who focuses on metals in biology.

“The chemistry involved in activities such as thinking and moving contain metals which play a key role in the ways our bodies function,” he says. Contakes does research that replicates in non-natural systems the way these metals act.

His research may help reduce carbon dioxide emissions or prevent unwanted side effects in drugs.

Contakes earned his doctorate at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was named a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow, a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellow and a Barry Goldwater Scholar.

Most recently, Contakes taught at Azusa Pacific University and is a visitor at the California Institute of Technology, where he has been conducting research on bioinorganic and biophysical chemistry for the past six years.

His research has been published in more than a dozen scientific journals.

“My passion is to see students’ lives change and grow in terms of their ability to think, their personal maturity, their Christian walk and their professional development,” Contakes says.

Former Westmont provost and current Houghton president Shirley Mullen encouraged him to interview for the faculty position.

“I fell in love with the place and the people,” Contakes says. “Every conversation I had contributed to my Christian life. I felt that I was challenged here by people’s interactions with me and could see myself committing to the general approach to Christian education.”

Contakes and his wife, Susan, have a one-year old son, John.