Thomas Wenzel, the Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry, nationally known as a pioneer in teaching hands-on learning to undergraduates through research, was named to The Analytical Scientist journal’s “Power List” as one of the world’s top 25 science mentors and educators over the last decade.

The Analytical Scientist Power List for 2023 recognizes “excellence and impact” over the past decade in four categories: innovators and trailblazers, leaders and advocates, connectors and interdisciplinarians, and mentors and educators. 

The curated listamong the 25 mentors and educators highlighted by the publication, which focuses on the latest developments and advancements in analytical chemistry and related disciplines. Moreover, of the 100 people from around the world named to the journal’s list, Wenzel was the only one from academia from an undergraduate institution.

“I’m very proud of the research I was able to accomplish over my career, especially those where I engaged undergraduates in the research.”

Tom Wenzel

“I would have been very happy just to make the list. But when you look back at the history of that list, to get a No. 3 ranking was a nice surprise,” said Wenzel. 

A member of the �ֲ���ý faculty from 1981 to 2020, Wenzel became nationally recognized for teaching undergraduates through active learning in the 1990s. For the remainder of his career, Wenzel remained at the forefront of best practices in chemistry education.

He produced 181 scholarly publications and he was awarded more than $3.75 million in external research and education grants. He published extensively on chirality, a molecular phenomenon that parallels “handedness” in humans, developing techniques to identify molecules that are mirror images of each other but can have different reactive effects. 

But Wenzel is most proud of his work pioneering hands-on learning in the classroom, which was modeled after the work he did at �ֲ���ý with his student researchers in his lab.

Today it’s fairly common for faculty at undergraduate institutions to co-author articles in scholarly journals based on research they conduct with students. That was not the case 40 years ago. Yet Wenzel started doing it in the 1980s and noticed how students helping with research in his lab retained information longer and better than the students who were taught through lectures and recipe-based lab experiences. 

Among Wenzel’s 96 articles focusing on research in his lab, 67 were co-authored by �ֲ���ý students. “For them it was a fairly profound educational experience. It really pushes what the student needs to think about and do and achieve to a new level,” Wenzel said. 

In 1995, Wenzel published “A New Approach to Undergraduate Analytical Chemistry,” a seminal article in the journal Analytical Chemistry on his cutting-edge approach to teaching chemistry. The article went viral — in a snail-mail sense.

“In those days it was mostly pre-email. I got over 200 letters sent to me from around the world asking for a copy of the article, plus more information,” Wenzel said. “Things just took off from there.”

In 1997, Wenzel was invited to speak about his innovative teaching approach at a workshop at the University of Kansas that was funded by the National Science Foundation. His talk focused on “best practices” for teaching chemistry through active learning. It led to Wenzel leading workshops across the country on his active-learning approach. 

“After the 1997 workshops, I spent the next 25 years on efforts to promote active learning,” Wenzel said. 

Wenzel and a group of academics interested in this growing field of science formed an that provided free resources to promote active learning in chemistry. 

In the early 2000s, he served for eight years as the editor of a series on education in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry. Between 2008 and 2020, Wenzel received more than $1.4 million in National Science Foundation grants for programs affiliated with the analytical science digital library. 

During those years, awards and recognition flowed Wenzel’s way. 

In 2002, he became the first chemist to receive the Council on Undergraduate Research Fellows Award. He received the 2010 American Chemical Society National Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution, the designation as a fellow of the American Chemical Society in 2016, and the 2020 George C. Pimentel Award, which is the American Chemical Society’s national award that acknowledges outstanding work in chemical education. 

Before Wenzel retired in 2020, James Weissman ’84 and his wife gave $100,000 to establish the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research to guarantee students could continue to learn chemistry by conducting research at �ֲ���ý.  

“I’m very proud of the research I was able to accomplish over my career, especially those where I engaged undergraduates in the research,” Wenzel said.

In the early 1990s, �ֲ���ý professor Thomas Wenzel began to think that the traditional approach to teaching chemistry — lectures and what he calls “recipe-based” laboratory assignments — was missing something.

For instance, students that Wenzel expected to thrive in his courses scored poorly on exams. Yet, in contrast, the students he hired to perform hands-on research in his �ֲ���ý lab were highly engaged with the material.

“It seemed that the learning that happened in the research work was so much deeper and so much longer-lasting,” Wenzel says. “I realized I needed to make my instructional laboratories more research-like in their approach.”

So in his courses, Wenzel started putting students in groups to puzzle through questions and calculations. He framed his lab assignments as solving problems instead of following recipes. His students engaged more robustly with the material, and exam scores went up.

Dana Professor of Chemistry Tom Wenzel, who will retire in 2020, has been honored with the establishment of a student research fund in his name and an achievement award from the American Chemical Society. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Those simple steps began a pedagogical evolution that has made Wenzel, now the college’s Dana Professor of Chemistry, a national leader in the teaching of chemistry — including pioneering work to create open-access course materials — as well as a model for involving students in research and a prolific researcher.

And at the start of his last year of teaching before retirement from �ֲ���ý in 2020, Wenzel received two major honors that recognize his contributions to his field and to the lives of his students.

“It’s hard to imagine a more gratifying way to end my career.”

In August, the American Chemical Society awarded him its 2019 George C. Pimentel Award for “outstanding contributions to chemical education.”

Soon thereafter, one of Wenzel’s former students paid tribute to his mentor by establishing the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research, to support students conducting summer research on campus.

“It’s hard to imagine a more gratifying way to end my career,” Wenzel says of the two career honors.

+A Few Wenzel Awards

Rachel Austin, who taught at �ֲ���ý from 1995 to 2015, saw firsthand how Wenzel transformed chemistry education.

“Tom has expanded the notion of ‘learning through doing’ to the teaching of chemistry at all levels of the undergraduate curriculum,” says Austin, who is the Diana T. and P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry at Barnard College and who nominated Wenzel for the Pimentel award.

She adds, “He was well ahead of the wide-scale recognition of the value of inquiry-based learning” in chemistry.

In this summer 2005 image of Tom Wenzel’s typically active research lab, Wenzel (left) and post-graduate research fellow Catherine Dignam (second from left) work with student researchers: from left, Matt Chodomel ’06, Shawna-Kaye Lester ’08, and Monique Brown ’07. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Complementing Wenzel’s accomplishments in chemistry education are his research achievements. He has published extensively on chirality, a molecular phenomenon that parallels “handedness” in humans.

He develops techniques to identify molecules that are mirror images of each other but can have different reactive effects — for example, one form of the drug thalidomide reduces morning sickness, but its mirror image was responsible for birth defects in the 1950s and 60s.

Along the way, Wenzel has become a pioneer in bringing undergraduates into his research lab. Some 128 students — 80 of them women — have worked in his lab since he joined the �ֲ���ý faculty. Throughout his career, Austin says, Wenzel has been “an active proponent for the involvement of women and minorities in science.”

“One of my approaches was to start hiring first-year students out of my general chemistry core course into my research laboratory,” he says, “as a way to provide them a more realistic experience of what it meant to actually do chemistry.”

In addition to his publications on pedagogy, Wenzel has published some 40 articles on undergraduate research, been involved with the national Council on Undergraduate Research, and, in 2010, won the American Chemical Society Research at an Undergraduate Institution Award.

A nationally recognized advocate for undergraduate research, Tom Wenzel (third from right) poses with some of his students in 2015 at the International Chirality Conference. Wenzel chaired the 2015 event, the premier conference in his research field, and �ֲ���ý was the only undergrad school represented. Back row, from left, William Patton ’15, Mira Carey-Hatch ’14, Yolanda Rodriguez ’15, Tom Wenzel, Alison Dowey ’15. Front row, from left, Tayla Duarte ’17, Cira Mollings Puentes ’16, Caroline Holme ’16, Brielle Dalvano ’16, and Anna Berenson ’16.

Of Wenzel’s 96 published research articles, 67 have had �ֲ���ý student co-authors. One of those authors was Jim Weissman ’84, who says he always wanted to study chemistry, but his sophomore classes were a “rocky road.”

Wenzel both encouraged Weissman to stick with the major and helped him as he caught up with course work. Then he hired Weissman to work in his lab.

Wenzel “touched the lives of a lot of chemistry majors.”

For his senior thesis, Weissman studied methods for detecting pharmaceuticals and pollutants and, along with Wenzel and three fellow students, co-authored an article, “Lanthanide ions as luminescent chromophores for liquid chromatographic detection.”

Wenzel “had a unique style, and he touched the lives of a lot of chemistry majors,” Weissman says. “Had he not been at �ֲ���ý, those opportunities that I had would not have been realized.”

That influence is sharply evident in the paper that Weissman coauthored. His fellow authors, Elsie DiBella ’85, Maureen J. Joseph ’83, and Joshua R. Schultz ’83, all earned doctoral degrees. They’ve all forged careers in biotech, as has Weissman, who is now chief operating officer at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals.

Early in this semester, Weissman and his wife, Kyoko Oba Weissman, donated $100,000 to �ֲ���ý to establish the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research, which provides scholarships for students to conduct summer chemistry or biochemistry research on campus.

Tom Wenzel (center) is flanked by donors Jim Weissman ’84 and Kyoko Weissman as they celebrate the establishment in September of the Thomas J. Wenzel Endowed Fund for Undergraduate Chemistry Research. Joining them in Dana Chemistry Hall are, from left, Jake O’Hara ’21, Nick Jones ’20, Shanzeh Rauf ’21, Maddie Murphy ’20, Associate Professor of Chemistry Matt Côté, and Owen Bailey ’22.  (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In September, Wenzel and the Weissmans, who were on campus bringing their son back to �ֲ���ý for his sophomore year, hand-delivered a $100,000 check to fund the endowment and gathered with chemistry students to celebrate the fund’s establishment.

“If I could only highlight one thing about my whole career, it would be engaging undergraduates in meaningful research,” Wenzel says.

“That a former student of mine gave money to the college to provide summer support for future undergraduates — forever — I truly don’t think there could be any more meaningful honor to me than that.”

Thomas Wenzel and Jim Weissman ’84 reconnect in a laboratory in Dana Chemistry Hall in September. Weissman, a chemistry major who was mentored by Wenzel and is now chief operating officer at Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, established with his wife an endowed fund in Wenzel’s name. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Active renovation is bringing two Carnegie Science Hall classrooms closer to their new role as settings for the teaching approach called active learning.

The heavier lift has been the makeover of Carnegie 339. Structural demolition that took place during July left the room barely recognizable in early August. Gone are the tiered floor and two partition walls that enclosed a storeroom and projection booth — and yet the curious effect of this volumetric enlargement was to make the room seem smaller.

Room 339 in Carnegie Science Hall is shown on Aug. 9, midway through its renovation. The classroom is being made over to support active learning. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Perhaps that’s because the room was lit only by work lights during our visit. Gone with the floor and wall was the original plaster ceiling, so the permanent room lighting was on hiatus. A suspended ceiling will replace the original.

Speaking of that plaster ceiling, workers found “a lot of stuff” — abandoned materials — concealed by the old ceiling, says Paul Farnsworth. The stuff included wiring for two previous sets of lights, notes Farnsworth, the Facility Services project manager for this and several other room makeovers this summer.

Other evidence of past civilizations was revealed by removing the wooden tiered floor, which had covered a concrete subfloor. Farnsworth and the renovation team had expected to find a disused HVAC opening, which they plugged with concrete. But there was another artifact that came as a surprise.

And here’s Carnegie 339 about a week earlier. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

That was a fire suppression system designed to flood the space under the raised floor in case of a blaze. The component pipes and sprinkler heads — still hooked up — were a surprise to the construction team, as they didn’t appear on any plans and a hatch providing access to them had been blocked off by earlier renovations.

“Fortunately we didn’t damage them when we took the tiered floor out,” Farnsworth says. He adds, “It took a little detective work” to trace back the plumbing that fed the system.

Another vestige of the past will remain in Room 339, albeit concealed. An I-beam is mounted above the space where the instructor’s counter used to be, presumably to hang heavy apparatus from. The beam will stay when the drop ceiling is installed.

Awaiting “node chairs” and whiteboards is Carnegie 225, one of two refitted active-learning classrooms in the science building. The room is seen from a corridor through a new window intended to impart a sense of spaciousness. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

If anyone needs to use it, Farnsworth says, it will be easy to push aside a couple of ceiling tiles to expose and make use of it. “They went to a lot of effort to put it there.”

The structural reconfiguration included the creation of a new main entrance. That doorway is now aligned with the corridor wall, in contrast to the wacky angle of its previous orientation. Because the room’s seating capacity has been reduced, from 53 to 36, the building code also permitted the walling-over of a secondary side entrance.

Farnsworth notes that the wallboard has been hung and primed, and the wiring rough-ins are complete. Finish painting is underway this week, and the new ceiling will be hung soon.

A faculty office in the new neuroscience center in Hathorn Hall. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Completion of the other active-learning classroom, Room 225, is on hold until late this month, at which point whiteboards will be placed around the walls and furniture moved in. In July, a window was cut in a wall to make the room seem more spacious; college designers are now working on a translucent film to stick on the glass and minimize visual distractions from the corridor.

Hathorn Hall is also on Farnsworth’s summer chore list. Essentially complete is the conversion of a large common space for emeriti faculty on the ground floor to a center for neuroscience. Enjoying serene, big-windowed offices in Hathorn since Aug. 1 are neuroscience professors Jason Castro, Nancy Koven, and a new member of the neuro faculty, Michelle Greene.

A fourth room has been remade as Greene’s lab, which includes two isolation booths, and christened the �ֲ���ý Computational Vision Lab. (Martin Kruse, another new hire and a joint appointment between bio and neuro, is quartered in Carnegie.)

Christened the �ֲ���ý Computational Vision Lab, neuroscientist Michelle Greene’s new neuroscience lab in Hathorn Hall includes two isolation rooms. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Finally in Hathorn, the math computer lab in Room 207 has been upgraded to meet the burgeoning campus demand for desktop computers. Along with new paint, furniture, audiovisual gear, and ceiling, the room was outfitted with 21 new Dells — an increase of six from the previous allotment.

As in Carnegie 339, here too the renovators found a surprise above the old ceiling, which in this case was a suspended one. The surprise was soot that had flaked off a wooden beam scorched in some long-ago fire — perhaps the 1881 belfry fire that threatened �ֲ���ý’ library, which was housed in Hathorn at the time. (Students living in Parker Hall got the books out of harm’s way.)

The lab was also upgraded to CAT 6, or Category 6, computer networking cable, which puts the facility on a par with any computer lab at �ֲ���ý. The old cabling, says Farnsworth, “was kind of slow for math.”

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions, reminiscences, and comments about facility improvements. Please email newswriter Doug Hubley, stating “Construction Update” or “Are you, too, kind of slow for math?” in the subject line.

Fresh concrete plugs a disused HVAC opening in the subfloor of Carnegie 339. The sign covered the hole while the concrete was soft. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Looming large in the facility improvements of summer 2017 is a wave of classroom renovation and office creation across campus.

Much of the work is driven by material considerations, such as a need for more office space.

But two classrooms in Carnegie Science Hall are being made over for a purely academic reason: �ֲ���ý’ interest in exploring classroom environments that support so-called active learning. Carnegie 225 and 339 are being used to pilot ideas that might inform the design of the college’s new STEM facility a few years hence, not to mention renovation of existing spaces.

Active learning is an approach to pedagogy that encourages students to participate, er, actively in the acquisition of knowledge, rather than passively absorbing facts from a lecturer — the “sage on the stage.”

The tiered floor, the projection booth at left, and the white wall enclosing a storeroom will be removed in a renovation of Carnegie 339. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Active-learning tactics can be as minimal as questioning students during a lecture and as complex as assigning hands-on projects or role-playing exercises. “It’s a continuum, like many things,” says Lynn Mandeltort, a visiting assistant professor of chemistry with a particular expertise in active learning. (Her methods include asking students to build models of crystalline structures from gumdrops and toothpicks.)

The most extensive makeover is in Carnegie 339, a medium-sized lecture hall. Structural changes are forthcoming (described below), but the updates most relevant to active learning involve furniture and communications technology — high and low.

Previously equipped with 53 plain old tablet-arm desks, the reborn Room 339 will seat 36 at new dual-mode tables: Each table consists of two trapezoidal halves that can be used separately or latched together into a hexagon.

Carnegie 225 on June 14, 2017. To make the room more suitable for active-learning pedagogy, whiteboards will be installed around the walls and the tablet-arm desks will be replaced with node chairs. A window will be placed to the right of the pillar, too, but that’s to make the room seem bigger. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

This flexible design accommodates a variety of classroom activities. With the hexagon form, six students face each other, supporting collaboration. And hexagons fit together neatly to form larger surfaces.

The trapezoids seat three and can be arranged, say, in a big circle to promote group discussions, or in rows to face an instructor or projector screen (or in rows facing away from each other in case the class is grumpy).

“It’s no longer always the traditional lecture style, so we’re trying not to have a front to the classroom,” says Paul Farnsworth, the Facility Services project manager for the Carnegie renovations. So in lieu of one big writing board that everyone’s supposed to focus on, whiteboards will be mounted on each wall, giving every working group a place to sketch and calculate.

While one projection screen will be big enough for the whole room to view, each hexagon table will have its own computer monitor — and, again with the emphasis on flexibility and collaboration, material from any computer in the room can be displayed on any monitor, including the big screen.

Part of a science-technology array in a storeroom next to Carnegie 339, this Hampden direct-current distributor sends DC — of the voltage of your choice! — to outlets in several classrooms to power lab instruments. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

What about that structural work, which began with demolition during the week of June 26?

A Lewiston firm, Randall Swan Building and Remodeling, will level the floor of Room 339, which was originally tiered to afford good views of the sage on the stage. The room entrance, now at an awkward angle in the corridor wall, will be set flush and widened.

Overall square footage will be increased by removing two walls, one that encloses a projection booth (that vanishing species) and a second that sets off a long skinny storeroom.

(When we visited in mid-June, the storeroom housed an intriguing assortment of 20th-century lab technology, such as a Hampden rheostat board that can feed direct current, of variable voltages, to outlets around the third floor to power lab equipment.)

A wooden spectroscope in a storeroom adjacent to Carnegie 339. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Downstairs in Room 225, most of the structural work was done last year, including leveling the raked floor. However, this summer a new window will be installed — not to provide a view, since it’s an interior classroom and the window will overlook the corridor — but simply to make the room seem bigger. Translucent film on the glass will minimize distractions from passers-by.

But the furnishings in 225 will change this summer in support of active learning. Forty “node chairs,” wheeled tablet-arm chairs that permit easy rearrangement of the room, will replace 49 standard tablet-arms.

“We’re adding whiteboards all the way around the walls,” Farnsworth notes. “And adding power outlets all the way around the room because, inevitably, students have to plug in.”

A grant of $150,000 from the George I. Alden Trust is supporting the active-learning renovations in Carnegie. The two rooms will represent, for purposes of contrast and comparison, slightly different approaches to accommodating active learning.

“The project is kind of a test bed,” says Farnsworth, “because we know we’re going to do this again” when �ֲ���ý builds the new STEM facility and upgrades existing STEM spaces in the not-too-distant future. Faculty and students will be surveyed after the 2017–18 academic year to assess the rooms’ performance.

The built environment, says Mandeltort, is “hugely important” to the efficacy of active learning. “When you have students facing each other around a round table, for instance, you’re changing the dynamic of the room and of the learning experience.

“It’s about them, it’s student-centered, they’re looking at each other. This table is where their ideas will come out, instead of them looking at me as the owner of knowledge.”

This ground floor space in Hathorn Hall is being renovated into offices for the neuroscience program. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Rooms for improvement: �ֲ���ý needs more office space, thanks to the establishment of the Program in Digital and Computational Studies and the appointments of several postdoctoral fellows supporting faculty and curriculum development.

Accordingly, the first floor of Hathorn Hall is becoming a center for neuroscience with the creation of offices for faculty, who are moving over from Pettengill Hall, and lab spaces.

But even with the neuroscience faculty moving out, Pettengill is still short of offices. So on the first and second floors, departmental lounges are being converted to that use, and other spaces will be remade as replacement lounges.

Finally, in other renovation news, it’s about to become easier to get from Point A to Point B in a big marine biology lab on the fourth floor of Carnegie. Three “peninsulas” — really, really long counters that project into the room — will be replaced with six “islands.”

The peninsulas make navigating the room a tedious proposition. “Everyone’s forced to travel the same long path,” says Farnsworth. “It’s difficult for the instructors to get around” to check in with students.

Can we talk? Campus Construction Update welcomes your questions and comments about current, past, and future construction at �ֲ���ý. Write to dhubley@bates.edu, putting “Campus Construction” or “Which voltage would you recommend?” in the subject line. Or use the 21st-century commenting system below.

Project Manager Paul Farnsworth holds a relic of 20th-century communications media, depicting a physics experiment and discovered in a Kodak carousel in the Carnegie 339 projection booth. (Doug Hubley/�ֲ���ý College)

Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry Tom Wenzel. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

There’s a time to be passive and a time to be active.

When you’re hoping to learn something, passive is sitting in a classroom and (hopefully) soaking in the lecture.

And there’s active, where you’re taking a hands-on approach to solving problems that have their roots in real-world situations. Sometimes, especially in the sciences, that’s the best way to learn.

Tom Wenzel, Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý, favors that second approach in his teaching. And the National Science Foundation agrees with him: The NSF recently awarded Wenzel and a collaborator at the University of Iowa $900,000 to further a practice called “active learning” at schools across the country.

In a 2013 file image, Tom Wenzel consults with Cira Mollings Puentes ’16 of Kingston, Jamaica (at left), and Mira Carey-Hatch ’14 of Laconia, N.H. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“This is a way to help faculty meaningfully change the way they teach,” Wenzel says. “To move away from lectures to doing in-class group work, and away from ‘recipe-driven’ laboratories to more open-ended experiments. And to move toward enabling students to design experiments, and figure out what the data means and whether it’s supporting their hypothesis.”

Provided through the NSF’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program, the grant supports Wenzel’s longtime leadership in creating an adaptable analytical chemistry curriculum that will enable instructors at all types of colleges and universities to implement active learning.

In this latest phase of the project, teachers of analytical chemistry from different institutions will take part in a series of workshops and follow-up activities designed to instill the methods and goals of active learning in the classroom and lab.

�ֲ���ý will receive some $632,000 over three years. It’s the third and final NSF grant for the project, which the foundation funded in 2008 and again in 2011 to support the development of online curriculum materials.

The balance from the latest award will go to Wenzel’s collaborator, Associate Professor Renee Cole of the University of Iowa, a specialist in chemistry education. Cole will assess how effectively workshop participants assimilated the active-learning approach, and how effective that approach was with teaching their students.

Wenzel is something of a pioneer in active learning, says Professor of Chemistry Paula Schlax, this year’s recipient of �ֲ���ý’ Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching.

“Tom teaches analytical chemistry using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual,” says Schlax.

“The approaches that he uses — active-learning exercises in the classroom, laboratory experiments that are inquiry-based and involve ‘real-world problems’ — are repeatedly reported to be among the best in helping students succeed in science courses and develop a sense of belonging in the community of scientists.”

“Tom teaches using methods that are original, and before his outreach through this curriculum project, quite unusual.”

Wenzel describes this latest phase of the project as a pilot to test the efficacy of multiple active-learning training sessions for chemistry instructors. “For a lot of people, a half-day symposium doesn’t get them to say, ‘I’m going to totally change the way I teach,'” he notes.

Instead, the training will entail successive sessions — national workshops followed by regional events, in turn bolstered by follow-ups such as visits to participants’ home institutions.

“If, three years from now, we can provide data saying that what we’re doing works — people are actually changing the way they teach — that could set the rest of the group up to continue this project,” Wenzel says.

“It could serve as a model for other areas in chemistry, and maybe other STEM fields in general.” He adds that the project is also designed to increase diversity in chemical instruction and, by extension, other realms of math and science.

“We have now run two workshops for faculty at historically black or Hispanic-serving institutions,” Wenzel says. “We had 52 participants, and many of them have great stories about how they’ve incorporated more active learning in their classes and labs. Several have gotten grants funded for curriculum work that came out of our workshops.”

A member of �ֲ���ý’ chemistry faculty since 1981, Wenzel’s research involves sophisticated techniques for identifying enantiomers — molecules that are mirror images of each other but, despite that similarity, can have very different reactive effects.

Earlier this year, Wenzel received a new entry on his long list of professional honors and achievements as the American Chemical Society designated him an ACS Fellow — a designation recognizing contributions to both the society and the field of chemistry as a whole.

The designation came as Wenzel, appointed Charles A. Dana Professor of Chemistry at �ֲ���ý in 1997, anticipates retirement within a few years.