'There are a few knobs you turn'and BAM! You've got a lot of chemistry!' he said.

Chemistry should be exciting for the new chairperson for the chemistry department here at the University of Dayton. After earning a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 1988, Masthay had been a professor of chemistry at Murray University before arriving at UD this July as the department chairperson.

As a chairperson, he is the official advocate for the chemistry department to the rest of the university, frequently deals with the dean and associate provost, is responsible for assigning teachers' schedules, creates the budget and, on top of that, still teaches classes.

As Masthay put it, 'I'm basically a teacher with less expectation to teach, and a more administrative side.'

He is a teacher, a chairperson and, additionally, a chemistry researcher focusing on the effects of light, stemming from an experience as a child which began his journey as a chemist.

'I've liked chemistry since I was a kid, in the third or fourth grade, when my parents bought me a chemistry set,' Masthay said. 'One of the experiments in the set was 'to change water to wine'.'

The experiment involved putting two colorless substances together in a beaker, then two other colorless substances in another beaker'and when the two new solutions are poured together, they 'magically' became a deep wine red liquid.

'A lot of what I still do today are with color changes that you can observe with your eyes,' Masthay said.

Now as an adult man, married and with five children, he still is spending his free time making things change colors, but now he is aiming for more practical uses, such as those involving carotenes.

Carotenes, the orange pigments usually found in yellow fruits, were hailed in the 1980s as soon to be a magic bullet: an anti-lung cancer agent.

Finland and the United States began fierce testing of the substance to figure out just how powerful it would be in the fight, only to find out halfway through their study that they were in fact quite wrong; lung cancer in test subjects increased by 28 percent, and mortality by 17 percent.

The tests were aborted quickly and the scientific community was left quite confused. Carotenes themselves were known to be anti-lung cancer. Why, then, was the opposite effect occurring when humans became involved? Something within the carotenes was changing them from magic bullets to carcinogens.

In an unrelated research project, Masthay was preparing to perform an experiment on a vial of carotenes when he was temporarily delayed and set the vial on a nearby windowsill.

When he came back, the normally very deep orange-colored substance was now colorless. Curiosity invoked, he pulled out another test vial of carotenes and, when subjected to ultraviolet rays from the sun, in just two minutes the entire vial was colorless.

It is now believed that when the carotenes entered the human body in the Finland and US experiments, the carotenes were the needed anti-carcinogens, but as sunlight penetrated the skin of the participants, the carotenes were changed into something different, which ended up being toxic to the human body.

Masthay's work aims to figure out what changes occur in carotenes when they are influenced by ultraviolet radiation, and determine what ways to make good use of the positive effects of carotenes without making them toxic.

Masthay is also doing work in preventing macular degeneration, an eye disease that usually affects the elderly as the negative effects of ultraviolet radiation, also known as sunlight, on the human eye.

'Carotenes and visual pigments [the part of the eye that 'degenerates' due to UV radiation] are shaped very similar, and the body even turns carotenes into visual pigments,' Masthay said.

While there is no cure for macular degeneration, work on preventing the disease is highly valuable. According to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, it is estimated that in 2000 more than 10.6 million people in the United States were affected by the disease.

Aside from his research, Masthay also has plans for the chemistry department.

'I would like to facilitate the growth of the new masters program for the chemistry Department,' he said. 'We also have a huge opportunity for intradepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration from the chemistry department. I look forward to working more with the faculty here at UD as well.'

'I'm very pleased where the instructional classes are at right now,' Masthay added. 'We currently have about 600 students every fall in the general chemistry classes.'

The majority of the students hail from the School of Engineering or are pre-med and biology majors, where chemistry classes are usually required. Just because many of those students are first-years, don't think they will be escaping Masthay's love of lasers.

'It is really fun to get brand new students and have them learn to use a high powered laser in a day, something a lot of them never thought they would ever use,' he said. 'They might not be able to process the data, but they can have an exciting opportunity to generate it. It's fun! Honestly!'