Teaching Programming across the Chemistry Curriculum

About

Ashley Ringer McDonald is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She received her bachelor''s degree from Mississippi College and her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on using multiscale modeling to study molecular interactions in complex chemical contexts. She has a significant interest in discipline-specific programming education and helping all students develop the computational skills they need to succeed in the twenty-first century STEM workforce. McDonald is a sought-after speaker and workshop leader in this area. At Cal Poly McDonald is involved in the Data Science Strategic Research Initiative where she works on outreach programming to teach the Cal Poly community about data science and programming. She is an Associate of the Molecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) and a member of the MERCURY Consortium. She also leads Psi4Education the education and outreach program of the quantum chemistry software package Psi4 and serves as the Undergraduate Programming Chair for the Computers in Chemistry (COMP) division of the American Chemical Society. Jessica Nash is a Software Scientist and the Education Lead at TheMolecular Sciences Software Institute (MolSSI) in Blacksburg Virginia. She received her bachelor''s degree in Chemistry from UNC Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University. Her research background is in soft materials and molecular dynamics simulations. As a Software Scientist at MolSSI she works on project related to productivity and interoperability. As the MolSSI Education Lead Nash uses scientific domain knowledge and software design principles to build programming tutorials and resources for researchers in the computational molecular sciences. She has also designed and taught courses for industry and academic institutions including UC Berkeley''s Master of Molecular Science and Software Engineering program. Under her leadership MolSSI''s Education program has grown to be a valuable and well-recognized resource within the computational molecular sciences community.