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Frank Gasparro
Frank Gasparro, a 53 year member of the ACS, is a native of Philadelphia. He received his BS in Chem from Villanova in 1966 and his Ph.D. In physical chemistry from Princeton in 1971. His career spanning five decades has had three major chapters in the 70s he taught at Wellesley, Princeton, and Colgate. In 1980 what was expected to be a short second postdoctoral stint turned into a 20 year biomedical research career starting at Columbia University and then in 1986 Yale dermatology where he established a Photobiology lab dedicated to unraveling the mechanisms underlying psoralen based photoimmunotherapies. In 2000 he returned to school and earned an education certificate at Sputhern Connecticut State University. After four years of public school teaching in Stamford and Cheshire, he secured his current position at Hamden Hall Country Day School where he teaches AP Chem and directs a research program. His students not only have won CT science fair prizes, but also have presented at international research meetings like the American Society for Photobiology. One of these students first-authored a paper using a novel technique to characterize psoralen photoadduct formation in oligonucleotides synthesized at Yale’s Keck facility. The research program at Hamden Hall is conducted in collaboration with researchers at Duke University and Immunolight Inc, LLC. He has been involved in the governance of the New Haven section of the ACS since 2016.
