Dr. Grace Muna wins campus teaching award

This morning Grace Muna was presented with this year's campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award along with cowinner David Blouin from the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. She is pictured above with her plaque with Dean McMillen of the College of Arts and Sciences. Muna regularly teaches our second-semester general chemistry lecture, both general chemistry labs, and the upper-level analytical chemistry and instrumental analysis lecture/lab combination courses. Students appreciate Muna's sincere concern for them that has motivated many students to rise up from a poor start. Muna also insists on hand-graded homework which many students claim has helped them more so than online homework systems. In addition to her teaching role, Muna regularly involves students in her research projects and serves as the director for our campus's LSAMP program which provides funding from the National Science Foundation to minority students for summer research positions on campus mentored by our faculty. The last chemist who won this award was Gretchen Anderson in 1996. Congratulations, Dr. Muna!

Wanted: Octet Violators

Earlier this semester, freshman biology major Emma-Leigh Sheaks Osborn drew these wanted posters, perhaps to help warn her fellow classmates about these troublesome elements on one of their tests. Both boron (B) and beryllium (Be) are uncommon elements in early chemistry courses, but they do make a notable appearance when we study Lewis structures for their atypical bonding patterns in which they prefer to have fewer than an octet of valence electrons in molecular compounds. Emma-Leigh has a knack for both drawing and science and helps to liven up chemistry discussion class with good questions. Thanks for the drawings!