HOLLAND - Leah Chase knows that oxidants pose threats to cells in our bodies. And when our bodies produce more oxidants, our cells produce more anti-oxidants to protect themselves.

Chase and her students at Hope College have even discovered that cells have proteins that serve as transporting mechanisms, sort of like miniature pumps, that help cells attract the anti-oxidants they need to fend off oxidant threats.

Now, thanks to a $466,724 grant from the National Science Foundation, Chase hopes to discover how the proteins know when to turn themselves on and pump anti-oxidants into a cell. The answer to that question, Chase said, might eventually help her and other scientists better understand how to protect cells from damage from oxidants.

The grant from the National Science Foundation, which will be spread over three years, will allow Hope College undergraduates to work during the school year and the summer months on the research project, which kicked off in June.

Even local high school students will get in on the research during the summer months through Project REACH (Research Experience Across Cultures at Hope).

Chase likened the research project to studying a group of people holding hands with one another. She said she and her students have identified which person first squeezed another's hand, and that each subsequent person in the chain of hand-holders then squeezed the hand of the person next to him or her. The last person in the chain then takes a final action, like blowing a horn.

"We know who initiates and who blows the horn," Chase said, but she added that she and her students want to know more about the steps in between.

Moses Lee, dean of Natural and Applied Sciences at Hope, said the grant Chase received is merely the latest in a long history of sizable grants the school has been awarded for scientific research.

"It's a big grant, but we've had bigger," Lee said, adding that it has long been the goal of Hope College to compete with institutions many times its size for attractive science grants.

He said the school is constantly engaged in research. Another study that students and staff are undertaking is in the school's engineering department, where students and professors are reviewing airplane designs and trying to determine how to design a plane that could withstand an explosion and not lose pressure.

Lee said Hope College engages in "transformative types of research," including work on cancer drugs, nuclear chemistry and nuclear physics.

He said the school features two facilities that further the effort of its faculty and students: the five-year-old Schaap Science Center, home to the school's chemistry, biology, environmental sciences and nursing departments; and the VanderWerf Building, built in the 1960s and home to computer science, mathematics, engineering and physics.

Lee said a unique feature of the school is that faculty there tend to work collaboratively and on an inter-disciplinary level.

"We have a guiding philosophy � that learning science or math or engineering or nursing are best done by doing," Lee said.

To that end, he said that more than 80 percent of the school's science faculty will lead more than 150 undergraduates in summer research.

Research requires funding, and Lee said the school has received an average of $2 million in annual research grants in each of the last four years. That represents a grant receipt rate of about 40 percent � almost four times the national average.

He said the school's philosophy of hands-on learning dates back 100 years, and the school will celebrate a century of chemistry and physics � and experiments conducted in "wooden shacks" � when the 2009-10 school year commences in a few weeks. LW