Friday, March 7, 2003 Carroll College Campus Center - Ballroom (2nd floor) 101 East North Avenue Waukesha, WI

DIRECTIONS

One of the severe problems that the United States is facing is the lack of our young students that chose to study Science! Currently, we are educating a lot of students from other countries in Chemistry and Physics, but not very many of our own American students. We began in 1989 to start a program of sending freshman or sophomore students to local High and Jr. High schools to give talks on current science topics. These talks are all on the slides, so we train the students in how to give an interesting talk without notes. This program has become so successful, that it is being duplicated at other schools, and has increased the number of undergraduate students interested in taking chemistry and physics when they come to college. The talks are on topics that have been in the news, and are of current interest to students. Many of the teachers out there are not up on the latest information, so they really appreciated the program. The talks are on: Chernobyl, the damaged nuclear reactor in the Ukraine. Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect., Air sampling at the South Pole in Antarctica and Ozone depletion., The Eruption of Mount St. Helen's in 1980., Hawaiian Volcanic Chemistry., and Volcanic Chemistry. In any given year we have about 25 students giving talks, and approximately 2,000 students hear them. We also give course credit for the program that counts toward the student's graduation.

Bill Zoller was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on March 3, 1943, but grew up in Alaska during the 1950's and 60's. He graduated in chemistry from the University of Alaska in 1965 and went to graduate school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied nuclear chemistry and graduated in 1969 with a Ph.D. He became an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Maryland in 1970 after a brief post doc at the University of Hawaii. He became a Full Professor in 1969 at Maryland, and while there published numerous research papers and led research programs in urban air pollution, volcanic chemistry, and atmospheric chemistry in Antartica. Most of his research has been to use neutron activation analysis to measure trace elements in samples from the atmosphere. His work also has been with the measurement of radioisotopes in the environment from atmospheric weapons testing and reactor accidents, such as Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union. In 1984 he moved to the University of Washington in Seattle as a Professor of Chemistry where he still works. Within two years of arriving in Seattle, he suffered a serious auto accident in which he suffered a traumatic brain injury that has removed much of his memory of both the past and day-to-day functions. Because he had to learn how to teach freshman chemistry without having a memory himself, he devoted his time to learning how to teach in a different way. He learned to teach chemistry using a computer and the computer PowerPoint program. Since then, he has produced over 500 computer slides for teaching freshman chemistry. These slides are now used with the Silberberg Freshman Chemistry book (McGraw-Hill). Since then, all major textbooks also have obtained computer slides, which the students love!