Learning To Write Op/Ed Pieces with Professor Rizk

This morning, our biochemistry professor Shahir Rizk teamed up with Gail McGuire (Sociology and Anthropology) and April Lidinsky (Women's and Gender Studies Program) to offer a workshop for IU South Bend faculty and staff. They provided instruction in writing op/ed pieces for the public to help encourage outreach to the community by sharing their research and scholarship online and in print. Although op/ed pieces are largely opinion ("op") pieces they are not written by an editor  ("ed") of the publication as the name op/ed might suggest. Actually, op/ed stands for "opposite the editorials". Rizk, McGuire, and Lidinsky have been trained by the OpEd Project.

Three nominees for the SGA Educator of the Year award

Professors Feighery (left), Muna (middle), and Marmorino (right) were all nominated by students for the Educator of the Year award coordinated by the Student Government Association and Office of Student Life. Although the award ultimately went to Dr. Ryan Olivier from the Department of Music in the Ernestine M. Raclin School of the Arts, we are very excited that three faculty from our department were among the nine nominees for the award. Feighery, Muna, and Marmorino have all regularly taught the two courses in our freshman general education program.  Feighery, our inorganic chemist, serves the college as assistant dean, while Marmorino, our physical chemist, is chair of the department.  Muna has a more unique role as manager of the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program on our campus to engage minority students in STEM research.   

Muna publishes in the Journal of Chemical Education

Our department tries to make undergraduate research experiences available to all interested students, but it is not always possible for a variety of reasons. Because of this, Professors Muna and Rizk have integrated research-based experiences into their upper-level laboratory courses so that all students get more than the cook-book type laboratory experiments that are the tradition in many laboratory courses. Muna recently published information about the course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that she provides to her students in her instrumentation course CHEM-C 410. Her article describes the students' use of microwave plasma atomic emission spectroscopy (MP-AES) to measure lead content in soil samples. Muna received a lot of positive feedback from students regarding this project. Several students who did not have time for a full research experience, or were nervous to initiate research with a faculty member, were thankful to have this short research experience in class. You can find her article in in the Journal of Chemical Education.