Opened Practices Users Working in: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry

1501 West Bradley Avenue

I graduated from Princeton University in 1979 with a doctorate in chemistry and went to work for Monsanto Company as a chemist for more than 20 years. I rose through the ranks to be come a Fellow in Corporate Research. My position was eliminated in a corporate downsizing in 1999. I then spent the following three years at Washington University in St. Louis as a Research Scientist in the Dept. of Chemistry and returned to the industrial world for another 6 years before assuming my present position as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Bradley University.

During my time as an industrial scientist I was continuously teaching and training junior scientists in order to increase their on-the-job effectiveness. I enjoyed this responsibility and made it a personal goal to one day make a career change and take a full-time teaching position at a college or university. My first formal college teaching experience came in 2007 at the Illinois Institute of Technology where I taught an advanced analytical chemistry course to graduate students. This experience was actually a part-time assignment I did while still employed full-time in industry. The experience solidified my career goal to do full-time college teach and the opportunity to do so came in 2009 in the Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Bradley University. My primary teaching responsibility at Bradley is the Analytical Chemistry sequence which is required of all chemistry and biochemistry majors. My main teaching interest in this position is provide students the knowledge they will need to do "real-world" science in the private companies where many of them will find employment. A critical element of doing science in industry is developing a high level of skill with electronic acquisition, reduction and archiving systems for managing research information. My students need exposure to modern research data management techniques and the Wiki tool is Sakai has provided me with the means to develop an electronic laboratory notebook for students to use in performing laboratory experiments which are part of the courses I teach. It is my desire to institutionalize this approach across in the university's science departments, starting with other upper-division chemistry courses. I believe the experiences gained using electronic laboratory notebooks will give Bradley students a competitive edge early in their professional careers and launch them towards long-term career success.