Chemistry Colloquium Program
Day: Friday
Time: 3:30 PM CDT
Location: A101 Annex Auditorium, Life Sciences Building
Unless otherwise noted, seminars will be held on Fridays in the A101 Annex Auditorium at 3:30 PM. Check the individual notices posted on bulletin boards or your e-mail box for confirmation of times and locations.
*Denotes Gameday Weekend
SPRING 2025 Schedule
Jason P. LeJeune, Ph.D.
LSU Environmental Health & Safety
Safety Seminar
Host: John A. Pojman
Vicente A. Talanquer, Ph.D.
"Exploring Student Reasoning in Chemistry to Guide Educational Reform"
Research in science and chemistry education over the past 30 years has demonstrated that traditional approaches to teaching chemistry often fail to help students develop meaningful understanding or the ability to engage in mechanistic reasoning using chemical models. Our own educational research has revealed that many students completing college-level chemistry courses still rely on intuitive assumptions and fast, frugal heuristics to construct explanations and make decisions in chemistry-related contexts.
This presentation will summarize key findings from our research on student reasoning and illustrate how these insights have informed the development of an alternative approach to conceptualizing the chemistry curriculum. This new approach shifts the focus from learning chemistry as a body of knowledge to understanding chemistry as a way of thinking. Over the past ten years, this revised curriculum and teaching method have been implemented across all General Chemistry sections at our university. Analysis of student performance using various metrics indicates a significant positive impact on both student understanding and achievement.
Host: Zakiya S Wilson-Kennedy
Martin Head-Gordon, Ph.D.
Host: Kenneth Lopata
P. Shiv Halasyamani, Ph.D.
Host: Slava Baranets
Gina Frey, Ph.D.
Host: Zakiya S Wilson-Kennedy
Joseph Schlenoff, Ph.D.
Host: Amy Xu
Erin McCauley, Ph.D.
Hosts: Jose M. Garfias, Fatima Rivas
Scott Snyder, Ph.D.
Host: Fatima Rivas
Mihaela C. Stefan, Ph.D.
Host: David Spivak
"Opportunities Created by the Mass Spectrometry and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facilities at LSU Chemistry and Beyond"
The LSU College of Science Mass Spectrometry Facility (MSF) is a cost center located on the main campus in Baton Rouge, LA. The facility currently houses six mass spectrometers that are available for organic, inorganic and biological mass spectrometric applications. The facility is directed by Dr. Fabrizio Donnarumma, Ph.D., and employs Dr. Isabel Vitorino Maia as research associate. The team is responsible for operating the instrumentation, maintenance, sample preparation and data analysis. In addition, the MSF provides assistance in experiment design, teaching activities that include mass spectrometry as well as grant writing and design support.
The LSU NMR Facility has six instruments with magnetic fields of 400, 500, and 700 MHz, offering both solution and solid-state capabilities. These instruments support routine 1H, 13C, and 31P 1D and 2D experiments, useful for research in chemistry, engineering, biology, and other fields. For more complex needs, the Bruker pulse sequence library and advanced NMR hardware provide enhanced capabilities. We'll explore some of the non-routine experiments possible with our instruments and the research questions they can help address.
Host: Robert Cook
Spring Break - No Colloquium
Chris Mundy, Ph.D.
"A conceptual approach to understanding complexity using the tools of theory and simulation"
I will discuss how simple concepts in theoretical physical chemistry can be used to understand complex phenomena in the condensed phase. I will emphasize Coulombic systems and discuss phenomena ranging from fundamentals of solvation to collective effects such as (anomalous) screening. I will discuss the role of the coupling between short-range and long-range interactions to construct models of reduced complexity to connect with experimental observations of complex phenomena in liquids.
Host: Revati Kumar
Good Friday - No Colloquium
Kelly Ayers
"Introduction to Topics in Crime Scene Investigation"
Hosts: Gerald Schneider, Julia Carroll representing the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society (SAACS)
Yan Xia, Ph.D.
Joint Seminar: Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Hosts: Anthony Engler, Donghui Zhang
Previous Colloquium Programs can be found here: Chemistry Colloquium Archive Page