Michelle Francl: E-Learning and Physical Chemistry

Drexel CoAS E-Learning Lecture Series

Wednesday May 18, 2005 11:00

Location: 4020 MacAlister

This is not your father’s (or my mothers!) physical chemistry course

Physical chemistry is a core course for chem majors, and increasingly attracts students from allied disciplines, such as biology and medicine. Yet in the face of enormous changes in the practice of physical chemistry, texts and curricula for the course have changed little since the 1950s when my parents were chemistry students. Eliminating both the lecture and the textbook is one route to modernizing the course. What’s left? Concise, topically driven interactive electronic texts (based on symbolic math programs such as Mathcad and Mathematica), context-rich materials drawing on the primary literature, IM office hours, blogs and guided inquiry resources.

Michelle M. Francl is a professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, where she has been on the faculty for almost 20 years, teaching physical chemistry, general chemistry and mathematical modeling. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 1983. Her research is in the area of computational chemistry, where she is best known for her work on methods for assigning charges to atoms in molecules. Current research interests include the structures of topologically interesting molecules, such as moebiusenes. She is on a list of the 1000 most cited chemists, a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling, active in the American Chemical Society and the author of “The Survival Guide for Physical Chemistry”.