Targeted Infusion Grant: Enhancing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum in the Natural Sciences Department

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Bowie State University's Targeted Infusion Project, entitled: Enhancing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum in the Natural Sciences Department, seeks a hands-on and interdisciplinary approach to chemistry courses for upper-level Biology majors. This requires new course development and the acquisition of various instruments and equipment to further enhance the teaching and research infrastructure. The project has five distinct goals: (1) develop and implement a Biochemistry Laboratory course that will be integrated into the current Biochemistry Lecture Course, (2) enhance the Organic Chemistry Lab II course curriculum with more inquiry based experiments, (3) acquire instrumentation to further develop the state-of-the-art teaching and research infrastructure in chemistry laboratories, (4) assess and evaluate student understanding of organic chemistry lecture and lab before and after the infusion of new instrumentation, updated experiments, and (5) disseminate project findings through journal articles, conferences and colloquia presentations. The instrumentation, wherever feasible, is equipped with new generation software and hardware to facilitate data sharing, management and remote collection. Enhanced undergraduate education in both the classroom and the laboratory will result from remote access and associated cyber infrastructure capacities. An auxiliary user group of eight faculty members will also utilize the requested instrumentation for research in diverse areas of chemistry and biological sciences. Students trained and educated as a result of this project will be better positioned for admittance in graduate school and employment in a constantly evolving interdisciplinary biomedical workforce.