When Ava King ’28 encounters a setback, she doesn’t panic.
As a member of Kalamazoo College’s cross country and track and field teams, she’s accustomed to difficult workouts, races that don’t go as planned, and the persistence required to keep improving. This summer, those same qualities have become just as valuable inside Assistant Professor of Chemistry Andrew Jensen’s research lab.
“There are a bunch of little things that can crop up that you don’t expect,” King said. “I think my experience athletically helps me find more humor in those situations as opposed to getting beat down. I still get frustrated, but being able to process those emotions differently has helped a lot.”
King is a biology major with aspirations for graduate school and a career in marine science. This summer, she is helping Jensen’s lab develop and test low-cost air-quality sensors that measure pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter, along with temperature and humidity. The long-term goal is to support community-based environmental research.
For King, the opportunity has expanded her understanding of how chemistry can intersect with environmental justice while introducing her to new technical skills.
“I’m lucky to be in this lab,” she said. “I feel like the opportunity came up at a good point in my academic career. It was a good way for me to begin to understand what environmental justice means, especially in a chemistry realm. I’m having a lot of fun learning a lot of coding, too, which is new for me.”
Her days vary depending on the stage of the project. Some are spent building and troubleshooting sensor systems. Others focus on determining whether the instruments are collecting reliable data. The team’s current system monitors ozone, particulate matter, temperature and humidity as researchers work toward deploying the equipment outdoors.
King measures success less by flawless experiments than by how effectively the team responds when challenges arise.
“I think day-to-day success is whether we can come back from little problems that crop up or things that were confusing,” she said. “Being able to come out the other side and understand it, that’s what it means to be successful.”
That mindset reflects lessons she’s learned as a student-athlete, where progress often comes through perseverance rather than perfection.
The opportunity to explore beyond a single field was part of what King sought at K. Although biology remains her primary academic focus, working in an atmospheric chemistry lab has helped her see connections across scientific disciplines.
“I feel like it fills in a lot of gaps,” she said. “I would like to go to grad school, preferably in some sort of marine science. We’re doing atmospheric chemistry, and the atmosphere and the oceans go hand in hand.”
Although she originally hoped to attend a West Coast university with a marine science program, King said K ultimately proved to be the right fit. She credits the College’s collaborative chemistry department for opening the door to research opportunities early in her undergraduate career.
Balancing research with summer training for cross country and track has been manageable thanks to the flexibility of both pursuits. After spending the day in the lab, she heads out to complete the mileage assigned by her coaches while staying connected with teammates through summer running challenges.
King hopes to continue contributing to the air-quality project throughout her time at K, eventually sharing findings with the community while helping advance the research toward new applications.
Jensen said King’s experience illustrates why student-athletes often thrive in research settings.
“I think Ava hit the nail on the head in terms of research taking a lot of resiliency and perseverance,” Jensen said. “I’d add that it takes a lot of teamwork with the ability to listen to feedback from others, whether that’s a professor, advisor or coach, and then modify what you’re doing to become better. In this lab, we’re working together toward one common goal.”
Those qualities make student-athletes valuable contributors in the laboratory, where breakthroughs rarely happen without persistence, collaboration and a willingness to learn from every challenge. For King, the same determination that carries her through miles on the course is helping move scientific discovery forward one experiment at a time.