Cheryle Beuning (Assoc)

Cheryle N. Beuning, Ph.D. graduated with a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry from Colorado State University in May 2020. While at CSU she was awarded a 2015 Chateaubriand STEM fellowship to work with a French research group on part of her dissertation research. She spent 6 months in Toulouse, France studying interpeptidic Cu(II) exchange in amyloid-beta Cu(II)-binding model peptides as part of a group that works on studying mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease. She further extended her French collaboration by looking at Cu(II) exchange to these model peptides from truncated amyloid-beta-Cu(II) peptide complexes at CSU, a work that is being prepared for publication. She was also a research assistant at CSU’s Central Instrument Facility, where she was able to learn new techniques and use them to perform critical research analysis for other groups and collaborators at CSU.

In 2019 she applied to the National Research Council’s Research Assistantship program to work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. She started at NIST in March of 2020. She will be working on various cannabis research projects that the group has been funded for via NIJ and other grants during her 2 year NRC appointment. She is currently working with others in the group on perfecting and analyzing a vapor pressure saturator method (dynamic vapor microextraction) for use of high volatility compounds, such as terpenes. Eventually she will use this method to characterize vaping oil headspace in both tobacco and cannabis vaping liquids. She will also be participating in the cannabis breath analysis collaboration between CU (Boulder) and NIST, helping to understand if we can determine recent use from cannabis breath samples from baseline cannabinoid content. Blood-Alcohol-Content is well known for alcohol to determine impaired driving but are unknown for cannabinoids. As cannabis legalization grows in the US, we hope to find a way to accurately determine recent use based on emerging breath sampling devices to help facilitate law enforcement determinations for impaired driving.