Graduate student Colin Gaines was selected among three other graduate students in the Rutgers Chemistry Department to receive the distinguished Reid Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Doctoral Research. This award included a talk by Colin, titled "Computational RNA Enzymology: Unraveling the Catalytic Mechanism of the Twister Ribozyme."

The Reid award comes from a chemistry fellowship fund established by the late Dr. Thomas Reid, a Rutgers undergraduate alumnus, who went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and a very successful career as an organic chemist at the 3M Corporation, where he developed the material that is the basis of the Scotchgard^TM treatment used in many products.