9451761 Eliason The acquisition of an FT-NMR spectrometer will significantly improve the chemistry curriculum. The new instrument will give the students the hands-on ability to record their own spectra which is pedagogically superior to book instruction alone, and a hands-on experience has always been an important objective for our department. A goal of this proposal is to introduce basic 1H, 13C, DEPT, 1H- 1H COSY and 1H-13C COSY techniques early in the sophomore organic chemistry course. This will assist in restructuring the laboratory curriculum of the second and third years to provide experiments that engage all students in a research oriented experience. Laboratory students will be organized into research like teams. The team will be given an experiment, will discuss experimental design and procedures, will collect and review data, and will draw conclusions and design new experiments as necessary. Unlike other programs in which the laboratory curriculum is a pure research project, our plan is to provide a mixture of standard and open ended experiments. Our goal is to provide a research type atmosphere while at the same time providing an environment in which the student experiences tangible success thereby providing the excitement of discovery to attract students into our undergraduate research program. The laboratory curriculum of organic, biophysical, biochemistry and physical chemistry will be heavily impacted by this proposal. The effectiveness of teaching of the basic theory of 1H NMR will be aided with the use of 1H- 1H COSY as a teaching tool. The power of 1-D and 2-D NMR techniques to solve structural problems will be shown both in organic qualitative analysis and in biochemistry. Concurrent with our efforts to revise our basic laboratory curriculum we propose to formalize the involvement of students in a structured research program. Instead of a single faculty member working with a single student, project teams consisting of two or more faculty will be formed to develop cross discipline projects. A special effort to recruit dual biology/chemistry major students, who have tended not to be involved in research, will be made to increase their participation.
