Over at the Just Like Cooking blog, See Arr Oh is hosting a fun little event… From Just Like Cooking:

In celebration of the 25th National Chemistry Week (Oct 21-27, 2012), I’ve decided to host a blog carnival called the Chem Coach Carnival.

Here’s my contribution. I hope it’s useful reading, I’m not sure how entertaining it is…

Your current job.

I am currently a Professor of Chemistry and the Chair of the Department of Chemistry at a regional state university {Mysterious State University Midwest}. In our system, Department Chairpersons are not administrators or supervisors of faculty, we are faculty leaders of our Departments. We’re still responsible for budgets and schedules and supervising support staff and speaking on behalf of the Department and running meetings and attending meetings and recruiting students and recruiting faculty and hiring staff and… Yikes. But we’re not “administrators”.

What you do in a standard “work day.”

My primary job is to teach chemistry, and that usually occupies at least part of my day. I usually teach General Chemistry, but this semester I’m teaching two classes that are completely new to me, “The Science of Cooking” and “Introduction to Research & Presentation”. These classes are polar opposites and the contract has been an interesting challenge. I typically spend an hour or two (or maybe 5 or 10…) each day putting together notes for class and testing demonstrations or experiments for classes, an hour or two teaching class, and a bit of time grading or doing other class-related paperwork. I also have a couple research students working with me, we typically meet a couple times a week. Between my duties as Department Chair and the various committees on which I serve, I probably average 1-2 hours of meetings every day ranging from “What are we going to do in Gen Chem Lab this week?” to “What are the 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year goals of your Department and the University as we move into the future?”

What kind of schooling / training / experience helped you get there?

Bachelor of Science (Chemistry, ACS-Approved) from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point; Masters and PhD from the University of Michigan (Chemistry, Inorganic); Visiting Research Associate (post-doc) at Michigan State University. My education and related experience leans toward the broader/generalist side of the spectrum. My PhD research involved a lot of organic synthesis (making ligands, building chirality, etc), inorganic synthesis (making transition metal coordination complexes) and physical characterization (crystallography, magnetic measurements, solution behavior, etc). The group I was in at UMich was a bioinorganic group, so I was exposed to a lot of the biological side of chemistry, but my project was very materials chemistry oriented (liquid crystals, porous network solids). My post-doc was with a very physical-inorganic group where I learned a little bit of laser spectroscopy and honed some of my synthesis and characterization skills.

How does chemistry inform your work?

Although I’m slowly getting sucked more and more into the administrative side of University duties, all of my teaching responsibilities are in chemistry courses, so I use chemistry every minute of every day. As a chemist, I also try to always keep a broader perspective on things and try to apply established solutions to analogous problems, not just in chemistry, but in everything I do.

Finally, a unique, interesting, or funny anecdote about your career*

One of the first crystal structures I got in graduate school was of a synthesis that was “wrong”. I had estimated the purity of a ligand and because my estimate was pretty far off I ended up adding a significant excess of copper(II) benzoate to the synthesis. When I started analyzing the X-ray diffraction data, I saw not only the copper complex that I expected, but there was a big old copper benzoate paddlewheel dimer hanging off the side of it. I printed out a copy of the picture, dropped it off on my advisor’s desk with a note that said “Oops, I messed up this synthesis”. It turned out the copper benzoate dimer was bridging between two copper complexes as part of a 2-dimensional coordination polymer that formed pillared layers with an open porous structure. This “mistake” lead to a few publications and over half of my thesis. Sometimes, mistakes can be awesome.

Where do I blog? Well, obviously here, but also at http://msumgenchem.blogspot.com/ for my General Chemistry classes, http://scienceofcooking100.blogspot.com/ for my Science of Cooking class, and starting this semester my research students and I use a blog as a real-time online lab notebook at http://bodwinresearch.wordpress.com/ . Too much? NEVER!!