One of the things I get to do in my current position at Sewanee is to participate in outreach activities at local schools.  Here I am at Sewanee Elementary teaching 5th graders how to characterize and develop fingerprints.  This was part of a "wonders of science" unit for Friday School, an enrichment program offered every Friday for one month during the depths of winter.

My main function as Laboratory Coordinator is to set up for introductory chemistry labs.  This picture illustrates a setup I would have to prepare for lab students.  I would assemble all the equipment necessary and lay out chemicals in the back of the room for the students to weigh out and transfer to their apparatus as required.  Most of our intro labs have about 20 students per section, so I would prepare 10 setups as shown.  (By the way, this setup is what you would see when the students do an experiment on the Law of Multiple Proportions.)

Sometimes I even get to do research!  This is a picture of me with one of my work-study students and a professor from the dept. of art and art history.  We collaborated on a project to electrically remove silver from used photographic fixer solution.  The project ran out of steam once my student and the professor left Sewanee, but I hope to get it back up and running someday.

One of the ways I use chemistry in my spare time is to BAKE.  I baked this cake for a chemistry department dinner we had at our house.  Each fall the department has a large social dinner for majors and professors to socialize, to welcome new majors, and to court prospective ones.  For the past few years over 40 people have attended our fall social dinner.  The Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society, Sewanee Chapter, are always a huge help in organizing and executing social functions like this.

I was privileged and pleased to give two guest lectures last year in Deon Miles's Science of Food and Cooking class.  Deon is shown giving a talk about ice cream, and I helped him prepare ice cream both with a conventional rotating ice cream maker and then with liquid nitrogen.  My first guest lecture was on chocolate - the history, the manufacturing, the culture, the distinctions of the different varieties - there was even a taste test!  My second lecture was on baking, specifically on bread baking and how it differs from cake baking and cookie baking.  It was so much fun!  I now have a very good appreciation for what Rob, Deon, and the other professors go through to prepare a lecture class.  It made me thankful to have the job I have!

The theme of American Chemical Society's National Chemistry Week (NCW) in 2006 was "Your Home: It's All Built on Chemistry."  The hands-on activities for this unit included making paint from colored chalk and testing the strength of spaghetti.  I am pictured here talking to the preschool class at Sewanee Children's Center about what makes different types of pasta stringer than others.  We tested how strong angel hair pasta, spaghetti, and fettucine were by taping them to a chair and hanging a small bucket on the ends, which we then filled with as many pennies as possible until the pasta broke.  Much fun was had by all!  I made so much paint that week that if I see any more colored chalk for a while, I think I'll turn and run the other way.  My thanks go out to all the student and faculty volunteers who helped to make this year's NCW a successful one!

In April 2007 the Student Affiliates put on their 2nd annual chemistry magic show entitled "An Evening of Chemical Magic."  Over 80 people from the university and the community attended the show, which treated participants to blasts, booms, and transformations of everyday and not-so-everyday things.  Here I am conducting an explosion of a piece of guncotton in this year's show.

In September 2007,  I went to Sewanee Elementary School to do some "Chemistry in a Ziploc Bag."  Kids measured out different amounts of calcium chloride, baking soda, phenol red solution, and water to create a foaming reaction that warmed up their hands.  It was loads of fun!  The demo was given to me by our late department chair, Ed Kirven, and I always think of him when I do this.  Here is my son Andrew and his friend Kellen measuring out chemicals for their reaction.

The theme of this year's National Chemistry Week was "The Many Faces of Chemistry: 20 Years of NCW."  This inspired me to choose some of my favorite demonstrations to do with the students at SES and the majors and work study students in our department.  We did a presentation in each grade and class at SES, for the Sewanee Children's Center, the University Child Care Center, and new this year, we did a session for homeschooled students here on campus in Blackman Auditorium.  Everyone was fascinated by fluorescent slime, solubility of lipstick, the famous Luminol Spiral, and the Methanol Cannon!  Here I am helping Mr. Jones's 5th grade class with their fluorescein dye for their slime.

In December 2007, the Chattanooga Local Section of the American Chemical Society gave me their inaugural Community Service Award, which I received during the December meeting at the historic Chattanooga Choo Choo.  I was thrilled to be nominated for this award.