education

EDUCATION FOR AN ERA OF CHANGE Universities reshape chemistry curricula and student research experience to better prepare graduates for 'real life'

Mairin B. Brennan C&EN Washington

Slowly but surely, a reformation in chemical education is taking hold in universities across the U.S. Among

the driving forces are a gradual erosion of the research boundaries between chem­istry and allied scientific disciplines, the call for a more scientifically literate soci­ety, and an increasing recognition that universities must be responsible for pre­paring students, especially Ph.D.s, for the realities of the job market they will encounter.

This era of change is marked by sym­posia that have become staples at the an­nual meetings of the American Chemical Society on topics such as exploring inno­vations in the chemistry curricula, new approaches to teaching chemistry, or ways to assess how much students learn in a nontraditional class. Discovery-based chemistry, which offers hands-on learn­ing and promotes curiosity, is finding its way into college classrooms. Chemistry curricula for nonscience majors are emerging. Well-established co-op pro­grams, internships, and summer work opportunities that offer undergraduate chemistry majors an opportunity to sam­ple the industrial workplace are being joined by newer programs that aim to provide the same opportunity for gradu­ate students and postdoctoral fellows.

"Real-world experience is very impor­tant" in the industrial marketplace, says Don H. Olsen, a senior vice president at Huntsman Corp., Salt Lake City. Howev­er, there are no easy answers as to how Ph.D.s should get that experience, he points out.

Efforts to provide students real-world experience are afoot. Last year, the National Science Foundation expanded agencywide a two-year-old engineering initiative that promotes partnerships be­tween academe and industry to give stu­dents a broader perspective on the in­

dustrial workplace. Under the initiative, entitled Grant Opportunities for Academ­ic Liaison with Industry (GOALI), some 15 grants worth $4 million were award­ed for chemistry programs. Among part­ners receiving the three-year GOALI awards were the University of Pennsylva­nia and DuPont; the University of Geor­gia, Athens, and Hewlett Packard; San Jose State University, San Jose, Calif., and IBM- J Almaden Research Cen- ^

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sities in Delaware and w Maryland (University of | Delaware, Newark; Uni- δ versity of Maryland, Balti- g more County; and Johns « Hopkins University) and | DuPont. ξ

Many, but not all, » GOALI-funded partner- | ships focus on graduate ϋ

education and postdoctor­al training. "The strength of GOALI lies in its flexibil­ity to accommodate activi­ties that make sense," says Henry N. Blount HI, acting head of NSF's Directorate for Mathematical & Physi­cal Sciences' Office of Multidisciplinary Activi­ties. Thus, GOALI awards might also include re­search experience for un­dergraduates and high school teachers.

The University of Pennsylvania and DuPont are using the GOALI award to fund two post­doctoral positions in combinatorial chemistry, one based at the universi­ty and the other at Du­Pont. "The postdocs are working on projects that are very similar," says

project coinvestigator Mark A. Scialdone, a research chemist at DuPont Central Re­search & Development, Wilmington, Del. "DuPont is concentrating on the chemis­try side of things and Penn on the bio­chemistry," he explains. Postdocs travel between the two facilities.

Having NSF fund postdoctoral posi­tions at DuPont "is not our idea of corpo­rate welfare," comments Scialdone. "Rather, we feel that we're partnering with our friends in academia [and] bring to the table a wonderful facility in which to do research."

Principal investigator William F. De-Grado, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of Pennsylva­nia, agrees. The GOALI grant "allows me to have access to the intellects and the facilities available in industry so that I can do projects that would otherwise be very difficult to do," he says. The re­search project demands access to very

MARCH 17, 1997 C&EN 43

educat ion

IBM-Almaden researcher Kenneth Carter (left) and GOALI student Paul Furuta, a chemistry senior at San Jose State University monitor solvent distillation process.

expensive instrumentation, such as ro­botics, that is available at DuPont, he explains.

"What [DuPont is] looking to gain out of this is just becoming a smarter compa­ny," says Scialdone. The postdocs are "going to define the frontier we're chip­ping away at." To ensure that the post­docs are free to publish results and talk about their research in job interviews, the investigators selected a project that would answer "fundamental academic-type questions that sort of open the Pan­dora's box on what we can do" rather than one that would be commercially rel­evant, he notes.

A GOALI award is supporting two graduate students in chemistry and an undergraduate student in biochemistry at the University of Georgia. In collabora­tion with Hewlett Packard, the Georgia group is developing a method to se­quence glycoproteins using matrix-assist­ed laser-desorption ionization mass spec­trometry and software for analyzing the mass spectrometry results.

"Working with Hewlett-Packard has been enlightening to me," says principal investigator Ron Orlando, an assistant professor of biochemistry at the universi­ty. Students are interested in learning about profit and how much money they can make, he explains. "And I think, 'Gee, I never thought about this be­fore.' " In addition to carrying out sci­ence research, students will learn about the concerns of an instrument manufac­turer and do market surveys, he says.

The most recent GOALI grant—award­ed to DuPont and the three universities

in Maryland and Delaware—will support five graduate students and three postdoc­toral fellows when the partnership pro­gram starts up this fall. Five more gradu­ate students will be accepted in each of the two subsequent years, but the num­ber of postdoctoral positions will remain constant. After three years, "we will eval­uate the program to see whether it should be continued," says principal in­vestigator Jean H. Futrell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Delaware.

Applications for the program are cur­rently being reviewed, says coinvestiga-tor Catherine C. Fenselau, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the Uni­versity of Maryland, Baltimore County. "We're very pleased with the quality of people who are interested," she says. "We've had applications from men and women and I hope we will see some from minority students as well."

Geared to preparing students and postdocs for careers in industrial re­search in analytical chemistry, the pro­gram will focus on diversified training in mass spectrometry. To broaden their ex­pertise, students or postdocs skilled in one area of mass spectrometry will be given a research assignment in another, says Futrell. Since analytical chemistry is inherently multidisciplinary, research projects might be in physical chemistry, biochemistry, or a variety or other chem­ical areas, he notes.

Postdoctoral fellows will spend half of their time at DuPont. They will func­tion as "submentors" for graduate stu­dents rotating through industry during summer and Christmas vacations. Post­

doctoral fellows, graduate students, and the six academic and two industrial mentors will meet frequently to share information. Students will attend mass spectrometry and analytical chemistry meetings, write biweekly research re­ports, and publish the results of their research. Courses taught at one universi­ty will be made available to the other two via video cassette or television, and courses or seminars that evolve from the program will be made available to other students.

"Our hope is to use this [program] as a model," says Futrell. Analytical chem­ists in industrial R&D "should be inform­ing synthetic chemists, engineers, and decisionmakers what is doable and feasi­ble by analytical measurements," he ex­plains. Graduates of the program might also be very valuable faculty members, he notes.

The GOALI program at San Jose-IBM evolved from a test project begun in 1992 with funds from NSF and the Camille & Henry Dreyfus Foundation, notes principal investigator Joseph J. Pesek, chairman of the chemistry department at San Jose State. Because San Jose State is not a Ph.D.-granting school, rather than training Ph.D.s, the broad-based program serves undergraduate and master's degree stu­dents year round and undergraduate stu­dents—including students from communi­ty colleges—and high school teachers in summer.

"It's a way for IBM to have impact on [precollege education]," says coinvesti-gator Charles G. Wade, manager of mate­rials analysis and characterization at IBM. "Teachers see why they are teaching chemistry," he explains. The teachers usually come from local areas, and a few have been hired by IBM in temporary sum­mer positions, notes Pesek. They've also had opportunities to bring their classes to visit IBM.

The program attracts lots of minority students and women, Wade notes. The students are fun to work with and the teachers appreciate the experience, he says. "We get an enormous amount of research done, and the school gets re­search done also."

Programs such as those sponsored by GOALI "are wonderful," says Kathleen C. Taylor, head of the physics and chem­istry department at General Motors Co., Warren, Mich. "The students get experi­ence. And the program provides motiva­tion for [industry] to collaborate with the professor and vice versa."

Not all GOALI-type partnerships are

4 4 MARCH 17, 1997 C&EN

new. An NSF-funded center at the Uni­versity of Rochester that focuses on col­laborative research between the Univer­sity of Rochester and Rochester-based Eastman-Kodak and Xerox is eight years old. Research projects (on photoinduced charge-transfer processes, for example) undertaken by graduate students at the center must be approved by principal investigators at both the university and industry.

"It's a different model for graduate student education," says principal inves­tigator David G. Whitten, a professor of chemistry at the university. "I've had sev­eral students who had one or more in­dustrial advisers," he explains. NSF pro­vides most of the graduate student sup­port, but Kodak and Xerox provide monies also.

The Science & Technology Center, which has a steady-state population of 15 graduate students and the same number of postdoctoral fellows, is housed in the university's chemistry department. A lot of the research is interdisciplinary. From the start, there was an agreement with industry that students would be able to publish their work, notes Whitten.

Individual schools are launching their own efforts to familiarize graduate stu­dents with the industrial environment. At some schools, for example, industrial chemistry is showing up on course list­ings. Futrell notes that the University of Delaware has piloted a course on indus­trial chemical research, which is built around case studies in industry. GOALI students will be required to take it, he says.

At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, associate professor of polymer science and engineering Bruce M. Novak introduced a different kind of industrially focused course this year. "We've been bringing in speakers from industry, not to talk about technical things, but to talk

University of California, Berkeley's Kegley (left) and postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Loeser examine gas-producing pellet used in air-bag module.

about various aspects of professional life," he says, such as mar­keting, business fun­damentals, team management, leader­ship skills, the art of

negotiation, and sexual harassment. The one-credit course includes work­

shops on leadership and teamwork. It's aimed at giving students "a jump start on their industrial careers so they're not floundering around when someone talks about marketing or finance," Novak ex­plains. "We train people very well techni­cally, but we don't train them very well in interpersonal skills." The course is list­ed with graduate offerings, but under­graduates may take it, he says.

At the undergraduate level, a major push toward innovation in the chemistry curriculum is being exerted by five con­sortia that have been awarded grants to­taling $14 million over five years under NSF's Systemic Changes in the Under­graduate Chemistry Curriculum initiative, which was launched four years ago.

Collectively involving more than 70 institutions, the consortia are exploring a wide range of innovations, including, for example, open-ended laboratory courses, active learning strategies, inter­disciplinary courses, and real-world top­ics. Several innovations are already be­ing tested in classrooms in preparation for dissemination to schools wanting to adapt and adopt them (C&EN, Dec. 23, 1996, page 17). Among them are mod­ules developed by the ModularChem consortium, headed by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Chem-Links coalition, headed by Beloit Col­lege, Beloit, Wis. The two schools made similar proposals to NSF and are work­ing together to develop a new modular curriculum.

"It's a very nice" partnership, says UC

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Virtual air-bag laboratory (left) and spectrophotometer allow students to bone up "virtually" on laboratory skills.

Berkeley's Susan E. Kegley, project direc­tor for the ModularChem consortium. "They've got small four-year liberal arts colleges, and we've got almost every oth­er type of institution represented in our consortium," including three historically black colleges. ChemLinks has a lot of experience in alternative ways of teach­ing, she notes, an approach that's "a lit­tle easier when you have a class of 25 in­stead of 300."

A module on the chemistry behind au­tomobile air bags, developed by the Mod­ularChem consortium, challenges stu­dents to design a better air bag. In the process, the students learn about gas laws, stoichiometry, reactions, and how to balance chemical equations. More ad­vanced students can learn about the ki­netic theory of gases.

Using new technologies to enhance student learning is another goal of the ModularChem consortium, Kegley points out. In a three-week-long multimedia homework assignment, the students are "employed" by the air-bag manufacturer "Air Bags 'R Us." Ensconced in a virtual laboratory-cum-office, they progress from learning about the effects of temperature and pressure on air bag inflation to bal­ancing the chemical reactions involved. They develop an air bag-filling chemical system of their own and compare it to the standard sodium azide-iron oxide sys­tem. Offices are outfitted with virtual li­braries that house movie clips, demon­strations, and cartoons explaining how air bags function and the chemical prin­ciples involved.

As part of the assignment, students must complete a worksheet and hand it

in for grading. "The software doesn't grade it for them," says Kegley. "But they know if they haven't got it right, because a [virtual] consultant pops up when they make a mistake and says, Ί think you had better check over your answer.'

"We have to provide students with a way to participate in learning," Kegley emphasizes. "We assume that this is go­ing to happen when they do their home­work, but there's a lot of evidence to the contrary. They chug through the rote problems at home, and they come to lec­ture and they're frantically writing as fast as they can without ever really stopping to think."

The interactive multimedia compo­nent of the air bag module gives stu­dents the opportunity to simulate reac­tions with sodium azide and iron oxide or to experiment with pressure and vol­ume in filling an air bag from a cylinder of gas. For example, the wrong mix of sodium azide and iron oxide will cause an explosion, which the students can demonstrate virtually, says Kegley. Sim­ilarly, they can pop their test air bag by playing around with gas pressure or volume.

Modules are being tested by a diversi­ty of schools to ensure that they're suit­able for all kinds of instructional settings. "We're trying to get the bugs worked out among friends," says Kegley.

The modular chemistry approach is undergoing a "big evaluation," she notes, because "people's first question is: 'How do you know this is going to work?' " Studies scheduled to begin later this year will compare how much stu­dents learn from a modular class versus a traditional class.

Other chemistry modules that are

well under way include one on solar en­ergy (covering electromagnetic radiation, absorption of light, conversion to elec­tric power, photosynthesis, alternate en­ergy sources, and cost versus environmen­tal concerns) and another on the synthesis and metabolism of various pesticides, drugs, analgesics, and neurotoxins (cover­ing structure-property relationships and addition-elimination reactions of carbon-yl, phosphoryl, and sulfonyl derivatives, among other themes). In the works are modules on vitamin C, protein folding, the origin of life, and a few dozen other topics.

Students at the University of Califor­nia, San Diego, are being introduced "vir­tually" to spectrophotometry. "The stu­dents do everything they would do on a real machine," says Barbara A. Sawrey, education vice chair of the department of chemistry and biochemistry. "They turn on the instrument and the lamps, set the zero and 100% transmission, put the sample in, and dial the wavelength, but they get to practice in an environ­ment that's risk free. They can take time learning. That gives them enough self-confidence that when they walk into a lab to use the spectrophotometer, they are a little ahead of where they would be otherwise."

Computers aren't a replacement for the faculty or the lab, Sawrey notes. "They're an augmentation. In many re­spects they change the way faculty inter­act with students. And I think the change, for the most part, is good. Stu­dents are more self-directed in their learning. Their questions are meaningful. One doesn't get the simple-minded ques­tions of 'How do I do this?' or 'Is this pink?' or Ί don't understand Chapter Four.' "

46 MARCH 17, 1997 C&EN

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Among other innovations in the making is a course for science majors that places chemistry in a biological context, which is being developed by ACS's Education Division. Approved last fall by the society's board of direc­tors and supported by ACS and W. H. Freeman Co., the course is intended as a general chemistry course that will cover the basic chemistry required as a foundation for a second-year organic chemistry course.

As an example of how chemistry can be placed within a biological context, Stanley H. Pine, professor of chemistry at California State University, Los Angeles, and chair of ACS's Society Committee on Education (SOCED), points to the chem­istry of oxygen transport in hemoglobin. "An instructor can discuss gases, because oxygen is a gas, or talk about oxidation states, because the oxidation state of iron is important, or get into all kinds of struc­tural chemistry," he notes.

SOCED members spent some time try­ing to decide which direction they want­ed this project to take, says Pine. "We looked at materials science, for exam­ple," he explains. In the end, they decid­ed that whether or not students were bi­ologically oriented, all of them are inter­ested in the world around them and believe they understand something about biology. "They can put it in con­text," explains Pine. "So we decided that even if they are going to be physical chemists, they would benefit from and be excited by this approach."

The new course will be a chemistry course, not a biology course, he empha­sizes. "It will be geared to students going on in chemistry and allied professional fields. It will not be a watered down course or a very specialized course. It's meant to be an alternative. We're very excited about it."

The University of Rochester already offers "an alternative first-year chemistry series" that views chemistry from a bio­logical perspective and is appropriate for chemistry majors, says Anne B. Myers, a professor of chemistry there. A chemis­try course based on materials science is in the works for next year, she says. Rochester has been introducing pilot courses on topics such as chemistry and the environment and chemistry and ener­gy, notes chemistry department chair­man Whitten. "I think what I'm seeing right now are more changes in the un­dergraduate curriculum than I've seen in 30 years," he says.

"Rapid advances in fields such as mo­

lecular biology and materials science al­low us to emphasize their fundamental υ^€φΐηιώ^8 in chemistry and provide many opportunities to invigorate the chemistry curriculum," notes Myers. However, she cautions, this is also "cre­ating a sort of identity crisis for [chemis­try] in that more and more chemists are working outside the core areas, and much of what is new and exciting in these nontraditional areas of chemistry is in danger of being claimed by other fields." To help prevent this from hap­pening, the undergraduate curriculum is changing to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of chemistry and to emphasize in­terdisciplinary concepts, she says.

Bruce B. Jarvis, chairman of the chem­istry and biochemistry department at the University of Maryland, College Park, be­lieves that evolving, broad-based interdisci­plinary programs emerging from chemis­try departments will bring about a funda­mental restmcturing of these departments. "As is almost always the case in academia, such a reorganization must take place from the ground up, not from the top down," he says.

A lot of energy is being put into devel­oping chemistry curricula for science

Mairin B. Brennan C&EN Washington

I t's no secret that young Ph.D.s face a far more competitive labor market than their counterparts did 10 to 20

years ago. The streamlining of corporate America that took place over much of the past decade ushered in an industrial culture based on teamwork and a much leaner workforce. Meanwhile, gridlock in tenured positions virtually immobi­lized the academic job market.

Now, even though long-awaited aca­demic retirements have begun to materi­alize and industry has stepped up hiring somewhat, the pool of postdoctoral fel­lows that burgeoned to more than 7,000 in chemistry and chemically related fields

majors, notes Géraldine L. Richmond, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, Eugene. She wishes more en­ergy would be spent on the issue of teaching science to nonscientists than is currently the case. Chemistry depart­ments and science departments in gener­al must grapple with how to do this, she says. "We can no longer be elitist and say we will only teach chemistry to students who have taken introductory calculus."

Oregon has developed a rigorous course for nonscience majors, Richmond says, and the students who take it "ap­preciate having a forum to discuss con­cerns and fears about technology while becoming educated about the science behind the issues." Many of these stu­dents are demanding to know more about science, she notes.

Richmond believes that although it is critical to develop good chemistry curricula for science students, educa­tors should be thinking about how to coordinate science courses with curric­ula for majors in law, business, sociolo­gy, psychology, and journalism. In the future, graduates in these fields will be influencing science policy decisions, she points out.^

in 1994 promises that competition for doctoral-level positions will continue to be fierce.

The issue of whether too many Ph.D.s are being produced for the number of slots that is likely to be available to them has been widely debated. An ACS presi­dential task force study published in 1995 concludes that "the mission of a Ph.D. program in chemistry cannot easi­ly be justified in terms of a general short­age of scientists and certainly not a short­age of candidates for academic positions." But it also states that doctoral education in chemistry should "foster creativity, flexi­bility, problem-solving abilities, and com­munication skills that will enhance em­ployment prospects and career satisfaction for chemistry Ph.D.s."

Ph.D.s Face New Job Market Realities Flexibility and seeking nontraditional paths remain keys to launching a career

MARCH 17, 1997 C&EN 47