General Chemistry: Atoms First

About Beatrice BotchRoberta DayWilliam ViningYoung

Bill Vining graduated from SUNY Oneonta in 1981 and earned his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1985 working on the modification of electrode surfaces with polymer-bound redox catalysts. After three years working in industry for S.C. Johnson and Son (Johnson Wax) in Racine Wisconsin he became an assistant professor of inorganic chemistry at Hartwick College and eventually Department Chair. It was here that Bill started working on educational software first creating the set of simulations called Chemland. This led to work with Dr. John Kotz on the first General Chemistry CD-ROM and a distance learning course produced with Archipelago Productions. This work led to a move to the University of Massachusetts where he served as Director of General Chemistry which serves 1400 students every semester. He was awarded the University of Massachusetts Distinguished Teaching Award in 1999 and the UMass College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Teacher Award in 2003. At UMass he also ran a research group dedicated to developing interactive educational software which included 15 professionals graduate students undergraduates post-doctoral students programmers and artists. After nine years at UMass Bill decided to move back to a primarily undergraduate institution and arrived at SUNY Oneonta where he now works with undergraduates Cow Town Productions and the UMass OWL team. Susan Young received her B.S. in Chemistry in 1988 from the University of Dayton and her Ph.D. in Inorganic Chemistry in 1994 from the University of Colorado at Boulder under the direction of Dr. Arlan Norman where she worked on the reactivity of cavity-containing phosphazanes. She did postdoctoral work with Dr. John Kotz at the State University of New York at Oneonta teaching and working on projects in support of the development of the first General Chemistry CD-ROM. She taught at Roanoke College in Virginia then joined the faculty at Hartwick College in 1996 where she is now Professor of Chemistry. Susan maintains an active undergraduate research program at Hartwick and has worked on a number of chemistry textbook projects including co-authoring an Introduction to General Organic and Biochemistry Interactive CD-ROM with Bill Vining. Before her retirement in 2014 Beatrice Botch served as the Director of the Chemistry Resource Center the Director of General Chemistry Undergraduate Program Director and Senior Lecturer II in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Barat College in Lake Forest Illinois and her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Michigan State University. She completed her graduate work at Argonne National Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Thom H. Dunning Jr. and was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology working in the group of Professor William A. Goddard III. She taught at Southwest State University in Minnesota and Wittenberg University in Ohio before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 1988. She is a recipient of the College of Natural Science and Mathematics Outstanding Teacher Award and is one of the authors and inventors of OWL (Online Web Learning) developed at the University of Massachusetts in partnership with Cengage Learning. She has been principal investigator and co-investigator on a number of grants and contracts related to OWL and continues to develop learning materials in OWL. Roberta Day received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Rochester Rochester NY spent five years in the research laboratories of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester NY and then received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge Massachusetts. After postdoctoral work sponsored by both the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund and the National Institutes of Health she joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts - Amherst rising through the ranks to Full Professor in the Chemistry Department. She initiated the use of on-line electronic homework in general chemistry at UMass is one of the inventors of the OWL system has been either PI or Co-I for several major national grants for the development of OWL and has authored a large percentage of the questions in the OWL database for General Chemistry. Recognition for her work includes the American Chemical Society Connecticut Valley Section Award for outstanding contributions to chemistry and the UMass College of Natural Science and Mathematics Outstanding Teacher Award. Her research in chemistry as an X-ray crystallographer has resulted in the publication of over 180 articles in professional journals. She is now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and continues her work on the development of electronic learning environments for chemistry.