Advancing Undergraduate Chemistry Education
at UNC Chapel Hill by Re-envisioning the
Modern Chemistry Teaching Laboratory
Nita Eskew, Ph.D., Director, Undergraduate Laboratories
Chances are high if you are reading this article and graduated within the past 30 years, you have a story to tell about time you spent
in Morehead Labs. Each year, over 5,000 UNC undergraduates take laboratory courses in the same building and gain meaningful
training in laboratory and research skills.
For over three decades, Morehead Labs has been serving students from
across the university over a broad range of majors and backgrounds. While its
walls stand unchanged, the nature of chemistry pedagogy to best train and
educate students in STEM has evolved significantly. If we are to maintain our
leadership in undergraduate STEM education, the spaces within Morehead
Labs must be re-imagined and subsequently renovated to meet the demands
of the modern chemistry teaching curriculum.
As a foundational discipline, chemistry is by definition convergent, cross-cut-
ting, and collaborative. The future chemistry professional will need to be
trained to work and communicate within multidisciplinary teams. Traditional
chemistry lab modules that pair students together to take turns running the
same experiment is foundational, but modern chemistry demands that we do
more.
We have invested heavily, but opportuni-
ties for giving are numerous. Our goal is
to transform every laboratory in Morehead
within the next decade. Your gifts have a di-
rect and tangible impact on our department.
We hope you will consider joining our effort
to transform undergraduate Chemistry at
Carolina for tens of thousands of students.
The ideal teaching lab will bring pairs into collaborative teams of students around a designated space with the ability to work on
meaningful research problems and share their results both within and between teams. Ventilation stations dedicated to each student
pair will remain an invaluable resource, enabling students to safely conduct rigorous experiments that wouldn’t otherwise be possi-
ble.
The design of a pilot laboratory that embodies each of these features is well underway. Graphic renderings are shown in the accom-
panying figures. Thanks to generous support from the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Chemistry, we
have raised the $1.5 M required to begin construction in the Summer of 2020 to transform two labs into Labs of the Future.
Continued on page 27
Ralph House, Ph.D., Associate Chair for Research
CHEM.UNC.EDU | CHEMISTRY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA |
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