The common denominator for senior Kyran Weemaels has always been chemistry. It’s what brought him to Cabrini University after a journey through Belgium, Canada, Ohio, and Kentucky, and it’s what will take him to his next opportunity after he graduates this spring.
For the past two years at Cabrini, Weemaels has balanced his time between the pitcher’s mound for the Cavaliers baseball team and the Chemistry lab, where he’s been modeling chemical reactions on computers in pursuit of biofuels research. Perhaps it is fitting that someone who is comfortable computing the atmospheric oxidation pathways of the chemical compound 2,2,4,4 tetramethylpentane would gravitate toward a numbers game like baseball.
Weemaels is the product of a geographically diverse childhood, as his father’s job kept his family moving from place to place. Born in Belgium, he moved to North America when he was one year old, eventually spending time in Ontario and in Ohio, where he learned to love baseball—not exactly the pastime of soccer-crazed Belgium. In middle school, Weemaels also began to discover his love for math and science, eventually focusing in on chemistry.
“In high school, chemistry stood out most among the sciences,” Weemaels said.
On the baseball diamond, he sought a different kind of chemistry. After graduating from high school in the western Canadian province of Alberta, he enrolled with athletic and academic scholarships at Brescia University in Kentucky, where he was a stand-out pitcher for two years before earning a spot in the pitching rotation for the Belgian national team at the 2016 European Championship in the Netherlands. A coaching change at Brescia left Weemaels feeling directionless on the field, and he returned to Alberta. He continued his studies there at the University of Lethbridge—a school more than three times the size of Cabrini—but he longed for a tight-knit community and a baseball program led by coaches with aggressive goals for the team.
“I didn’t like the big school experience,” Weemaels said. “I rarely saw anyone I knew, and it was difficult to get to know the professors.”
In 2018, Weemaels got in contact with Cabrini’s head baseball coach, Nick Weisheipl, and took a summer visit to the campus.Weemaels said he felt it was an immediate “fit” and was impressed with the faculty members in theChemistry program. He soon picked up to move more than 2,200 miles to Pennsylvania for his junior season.
“When I came to Cabrini, it was easy to get to know the professors, and I was seeing the guys on the team everywhere, so it was much easier to get close with everyone,” Weemaels said. “It felt good to have that connection back.”
Weemaels proved to be a reliable arm in the Cavs pitching rotation, notching five wins in his time at Cabrini, including a 109-pitch complete game victory against Neumann University last season.
“The way that Kyran pitches and plays baseball in general, it’s no mystery why he’s in the scientific discipline that he’s in,” said Weisheipl. “He’s calculated, he’s a deep thinker. He’s more of a craftsman who pitches to his strengths, and he’s been really successful being exactly who he is.”
Although he began his collegiate career as chemical engineering major, Weemaels accepted a scholarship to enroll at Cabrini as a Chemistry major and soon learned that he enjoyed Chemistry even more when it wasn’t tied to the mathematical framework of engineering. Weemaels said organic chemistry was an eye-opening course, and he was the first student to join the undergraduate research group of Assistant Professor of Chemistry Alexander Davis, PhD. The group works to publish its computational models for biofuel combustion engines in scientific journals, which ultimately provide reliable and valuable resources for the wider combustion engineering community.
In the year he has worked with Weemaels, Davis said he’s witnessed a “pretty darn strong work ethic” in the Belgian-born student-athlete, who has balanced his baseball practice regimen with his research work in the Chemistry program, earning a 3.7 GPA in the process.
With the remainder of the 2019-20 academic year moved to an online modality and the Cavaliers promising baseball season cancelled due to the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Weemaels’ final months at Cabrini are turning out to be different than he had planned. The NCAA has granted an extra year of eligibility to student-athletes whose seasons were cut short due to the virus, but Weemaels said he expects to move into the workforce after this spring semester.
In his senior thesis at Cabrini, Weemaels is exploring chemical recycling and plastics, a field he feels has great potential for societal impact for a young scientist. He is eager to take the skills and knowledge he learned as a Chemistry major and apply them in the energy sciences industry.
“We need to be able to solve the global problem of plastics filling up our landfills and oceans, and to potentially create an energy source from it,” Weemaels said.