In this episode, podcast co-hosts Dr. Dwight Stoll and Dr. James Grinias talk with Dr. Molly Atkinson, Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Texas in Denton, TX, and her graduate student David Hamilton. Atkinson and Hamilton are experts in Chemistry Education Research (CER), and they recently published a paper discussing results of a survey of bachelors-level chemists working in industry that asked them “What does industry want new chemists to know?”. The paper, published earlier this year in the Journal of Chemical Education, generated quite a lot of buzz on analytical chemistry social media.
In the conversation we talk about highlights from the article, and touch on potential future work that could fill in knowledge gaps identified by the first survey. The survey revealed some trends that will be familiar to readers of LCGC Magazine. For example, the surveyed chemists indicated that liquid and gas chromatography are two of the top five most important instrumental techniques that new chemists entering industry should know how to use. On the other hand, the survey also revealed some surprising results - for example, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy was not in the top-five instrumental techniques, despite that NMR occupies a prominent position in most undergraduate chemistry curricula in the United States. Finally, the guests and co-hosts discuss a bit about how Chemistry Education Research “works”, for listeners who are less familiar with this discipline than other more traditional research areas.
