Cecilia Vollbrecht, assistant professor of chemistry, is one of just 10 faculty members from institutions across the country to be chosen for a new fellowship that will help students in the chemistry and biochemistry department at Kalamazoo College attain new skills.
The fellowship, called Accelerating Curricular Transformation in the Computational Molecular Sciences (ACT-CMS), is managed by the Molecular Science Software Institute (MolSSI) through funding from the National Science Foundation. Through 2027, Vollbrecht will participate in an annual weeklong bootcamp at MolSSI, where she will receive curriculum development and assessment training to help her introduce computer programming and computation in her courses.
“I’m really glad to be selected for this fellowship along with other talented scientists,” Vollbrecht said. “Since arriving at Kalamazoo College, it has been my goal to make sure our students are getting the most current skills they need to succeed and that means constantly evaluating where our curriculum can improve. I think adding more computational knowledge, such as coding, into our chemistry and biochemistry curriculum will help our students leave K with essential skills for a broad range of scientific pursuits.”
Incorporating new skills will benefit physical chemistry courses such as Quantum Chemistry and Spectroscopy, a class taken primarily by juniors and seniors where they discuss the molecular reasoning for chemical energy, how quantum mechanics applies to chemistry, and how molecules interact with light to produce chemical reactions.
“I want to make sure our students have skills such as basic knowledge of computer coding and data-visualization techniques, which are important no matter what career they go into,” Vollbrecht said. “When students complete the modules that are added to the course, they will have a deeper understanding of the chemistry topics as well as the ability to explain basic coding techniques and write a bit of their own code.”
Vollbrecht said she has already started including some cyberinfrastructure skills in the Thermodynamics and Kinetics class she leads. But the goal is to enhance present learning in that class and others.
“I think these curricular adjustments will help all of our students,” she said. “Most fields our students enter today will involve working with computers to either collect, analyze or share data. The more background knowledge they have on the subject, the more prepared they will be to contribute to projects. I think this is a quality investment by NSF that will help continue training the next generation of scientists.”
Vollbrecht added that the weeklong workshop will be a great chance to connect with and learn from other people working toward the same curricular goals. It is a chance to share ideas and best practices, and to workshop how to best fit these new skills into K’s courses effectively.
“Although I have used programming extensively in my career, the workshop is a great chance to learn from other instructors on how to best teach these skills to our students,” she said. “As a fellows group, we are also working toward making an online repository where we can post our materials for other instructors to use. The goal is to help other instructors also have an easier starting point for introducing their students to these topics as well.”