Courses
Recently, Phil has taught three different courses: General Chemistry contextualized for Biology (CHEM 110B); Nucleic Acids Chemistry for graduate and advanced undergraduate students (CHEM 572), and guest lectures in Plant Biology (PLBIO512).
Awards & Honors
- Phil was selected as a Tombros fellow of the Center for Excellence in Science Education (CESE) to develop new teaching methods for honors introductory chemistry (CHEM 110H). Please visit newly developed CHEM 110H screencasts (sample YouTube) and demo movies (sample1 sample2 YouTube) to aid learning. Full playlist of CHEM 110H screencasts and demos are available as well. He derives inspiration from discussing education with his high school daughter.
- He was awarded the C.I. Noll Award for Teaching Excellence and the Penn State Chemistry Priestley Award.
- In addition to teaching courses, Phil interacted with undergraduate students through the Distinguished Honors Faculty Program in the Schreyer Honors College. This program allowed Phil to directly interact with students from a wide variety of majors and interests over casual dinners, outdoor activities, and in small-groups, enabling diverse conversations to develop that would not take place in a classroom under normal circumstances.
- The lab has also been actively involved in providing workshops to the Millennium Scholar program at Penn State and participating in the summer SEECoS program at Penn State.
- He was also named a Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar (2001) and received an NSF CAREER Award (2001). Both awards have a significant teaching component.