Teaching Philosophy
Presently, my responsibilities include the development of the CHEM 430 Organic Spectral Analysis course within our curriculum here at Behrend. The course has been developed to provide the students with an overview of modern spectroscopic techniques, including FT-IR, multinuclear FT-NMR, UV-vis and mass spectrometry. This course will follow the "recipe" of other successful teaching experiences of the past ten years of my lecturing career. Specifically, a traditional lecture course which utilizes technology where a true advantage is gained in student comprehension of the material.The course will incorporate peer-led workshops, where the students will present materials they are having problems with before each exam. Their peers will be encouraged to help and work out difficulties they are having with the material themselves, under my guidance. Great things are on the way for CHEM 36, but that will have to wait until the 2006-2007 academic year. For this year, I want to learn from and adapt to my new colleagues here at Behrend. More will follow on some new experiments I have devised for our Instrumental Analysis course....
Hypervalent Iodine
While the idea of "hypervalent" iodine compounds may seem a difficult concept at first, the chemistry is easily related to the core concepts of basic organic chemistry.
For example, [hydroxy-(tosyloxy)iodo]benzene (HTIB) or Koser's reagent bascically functions as a highly evolved bromine analog. If you can think of a reaction of elemental bromine with an organic compound, you already know one of the reactions of HTIB!