Farfar with wife Carol and grandkids Ben and Claire.
I am professor of chemistry at Millikin University with an emphasis on physical chemistry but teaching first year courses and chemistry for nonmajors. I am the author of the Primer, the textbook used by first semester chemistry students at Millikin and the first year chemistry laboratory experiments. These experiments are unique because they use real-world problems as a starting point and invite students to use the most modern instrumental techniques starting with the first day of freshman laboratory. I am in the middle of writing a second text for first year chemistry centered on the theme of chemistry of the elements. This text assumes the basic vocabulary of chemistry has been learned and uses it to discusses why chemists, geologists, environmental scientists, and biochemists need to know the basic chemistry of the elements. I've been particularly fascinated by the history of the discovery of the elements(see links) and feel that the thought processes so readily shared by chemists such as Ramsay, Priestley, and Mendeleev is missing from not only the teaching of chemistry but modern chemistry as a whole.
I have done chemistry on a computer for a long time; My graduate work in quantum chemistry at Southern Illinois University with Boris Musulin as advisor included programming in Fortran using punched cards and overnight batch runs; My dissertation on Time-dependent perturbation theory gathers dust on my bookshelf but it nevertheless is signed August 1973. During my graduate years, I worked with the early quantum mechanics packages, CNDO and INDO but had to branch out in other areas because computers were not available at Millikin in the early 70's.
In 1980, I had my first leave from Millikin as a became a research assistant professor in Jim Johnston's lab at the Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Illinois; There, I studied the adsorption of trace organics onto solid surfaces, discovering along the way that polytetrafluoroethylene is a good alternative to more common polymer adsorbants such as XAD-2.
In 1988, my direct involvment with computational chemistry was rekindled as I became a research professor in the laboratory of Arvid Carlsson; in Gøteborg, Sweden Professor Carlsson is the 2000 Nobel Laureate in Physiology. My mentor was Håkan Wikstrsm, now a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Grøningen in the Netherlands); In Sweden, I worked on molecular modeling of drugs that bind to the PCP receptor in the brain and distinguishing between drugs that are selective for dopamine versus serotonin receptors. At Millikin, several students have worked on follow-up projects.
In 1994 together with Randy Kok, I obtained a Silicon Graphics workstation for undergraduate research on molecular modeling and to develop a strategy for teaching ideas about bonding and spectroscopy to undergraduates using computer graphics. The funds for this purchase came from NSF and the Alden Trust. I co-authored a paper that Randy presented at the Fall 1997 meeting of the American Chemical Society on using software on the workstation to present tradition concepts in physical chemistry in new ways. I find that students more readily learn the concepts of the quantum postulates by working with real molecules and then tackle the rites of passage of the harmonic oscillator, particle in a box, and rigid rotator. I tell them these models might be obsolete in twenty years but knowing explicitly where things come from has its value.
I spent the spring semester of 1997 on leave working with Dr. Anne Rammelsberg on synthesizing new compounds that break apart protein molecules selectively. I have also received an additional NSF-ILI grant to upgrade our 20 year old NMR by Anasazi Instruments. The upgrade is here. It's great.
Recent research students include:
Anna Osladil, now a student at SIU School of Medicine
Nathan Grau, now a graduate student in physics at Iowa State
Sara Brown, now working at a clinic in California
Matt Hudson, now a graduate student in organic chemistry at The Ohio State University
Nicole Tester, now a graduate student at the University of Florida in Neuroscience
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