CHEMISTRY CHAPTER ZERO

About the Author

The author can be reasonably described as the 7-10 split of chemical education: Graduate and upper division undergraduate education and an interest in midle schools with little experience in between.

For most of his 36 year career in the Chemistry Department at the University of Texas at Dallas, he has been occupied with a research and teaching career in a university with high aspirations. He has carried out research and publication on the application of laser-excited fluorescence to problems in diesel/gas turbine engine combustion and in industrial scale mixing. Twice during that career he has spent a full year in an industrial research laboratory, and he has learned the techniques of Process Analytical Chemistry well enough to deliver week long workshops for college and university faculty members who may wish to incorporate such material into their undergraduate instrumental analysis courses. He worked for twenty years to make the Doctor of Chemistry program at UT-Dallas, with its mandatory industrial internship for doctoral students, a success.

He has routinely taught graduate and undergraduate courses in Physical Chemistry, Analytical Chemistry, and sometimes Industrial Chemistry with an introduction to Chemical Engineering. In those 36 years, he taught Freshman Chemistry for only one semester.

In those 36 years, he has worked intermittently with the Science/Mathematics Education program to offer courses, primarily for 9th grade “Physical Science” teachers. He has recently developed and taught a new course “Lab and Demonstration for Middle School Teachers”, and now he seeks to use his understanding of chemistry in the development of approaches and materials for presenting chemistry to pre-high school students.

He has never taught in the secondary or elementary schools, but he has enormous respect for the tasks and dedication of teachers in those schools. [Slight correction: In Fall 2008, he substituted at Cloudcroft, NM High School, for two weeks, where he taught Calculus, Pre-Calculus, and Applied Math. He did OK, but regrets not being able to reach the slower students well.]

Lynn A. Melton, Ph.D
Professor of Science/Mathematics Education
University of Texas at Dallas
Richardson, Texas 75080-3021
melton@utdallas.edu
972-998-8567 (cell phone)