Speaker: Jessica D’Eon, Chemistry, University of Toronto
Bio: Jessica D’eon began her academic career on the Canadian east coast with a chemistry degree from Dalhousie University. Combining her passion for chemistry with her love of the outdoors, she decided to pursue a PhD in environmental chemistry at the University of Toronto under the supervision of Prof. Scott Mabury, where she used a variety of techniques to understand human fluorochemical exposure. She is currently an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto where she teaches and mentors students in the environmental chemistry program, as well as those coming into university in the large enrollment first-year life science courses. Jessica is passionate about engaging in authentic and relevant learning experiences with her students. She has infused environmental topics, such as air quality and climate science, into the first-year laboratory. She has developed project-based learning initiatives that have students role-playing scientific advisors to a UN delegation or consultants to major manufacturers. She also uses a capstone laboratory course to explore current environmental issues such as flame retardants in dust and fluorinated organics in the environment.
Title: Using Environmental Chemistry to Scaffold Computing and Data Science into the Chemistry Curriculum
Abstract: The Department of Chemistry at the University of Toronto includes a well-established set of environmental chemistry classes and an Environmental Chemistry Major program. In this talk I’ll highlight some aspects of my involvement in this program including our recent work to scaffold the R programming language over a three-course progression which included the development of a webbook titled R4EnvChem (https://uoftchem-teaching.github.io/R4EnvChem/). I will also describe an initiative that began during the COVID-19 shift to virtual learning where we use data collected by the National Air Pollution Surveillance (NAPS) program to scaffold a data analysis framework into our first-year labs. This work is supported by an interactive webapp (https://uoft-chem.shinyapps.io/Air_Quality_App/) that visualizes the NAPS data and distributes student datasets and a webbook Excel for Chemistry (https://uoftchem-teaching.github.io/excel4chem/index.html) that uses gifs to demonstrate click actions in Excel. All resources are open source and freely available.