Incorporating Interdisciplinary Teaching Approaches into STEM Curriculum

Dr. Li-Qiong Wang got her Ph.D in chemistry at UC. Berkeley and has taught at Brown since January 2010. Prior to Brown, she was a Chief Scientist working in the Materials Research Division at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) for 17 years. She has been a program committee member for the Division of Chemical Education of the American Chemical Society since 2015. She was a program Co-Chair for the Chemical Education Division during the Fall 2019 ACS National Meeting. At Brown, she served on CCC from 2014-2017. She has been using her extensive research experience to help undergraduate teaching and research. With the help of a Zern Endowed Teaching grant, she has created a new course “Chemistry and Art”, which is being taught in the Fall of 2019. Through collaborative efforts between faculty and students, she has developed new and engaging teaching materials and laboratory modules with real-world applications, resulting in several peer-reviewed publications in the Journal of Chemical Education with undergraduates as lead authors. In addition, with the DOE support, her team built a state-of-the-art hyperpolarized 129-Xe NMR polarizer enabling the investigation of structures and porosity of novel energy, catalytic and biomaterials. She has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal publications. She has received several awards for her scientific research, including the R&D 100 award from the U.S. Department of Energy and a PNNL exceptional contribution award.

Kumer P. Das, Ph.D., is the Associate Vice President for Research and Innovation at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Previously, he was a professor of statistics and founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at Lamar University in Texas. Dr. Das also served as an interim associate provost for research at Lamar. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Auburn University in 2005. His research interests are statistics, big data analytics, actuarial mathematics, undergraduate research, and international education. He has received many regional and national teaching, mentoring, and research awards. Notably, he received the 2013 Mathematical Association of America’s Alder Award for distinguished teaching. He also received the 2016 Mathematical Association of America’s Robert V. Hogg Award for Excellence in Teaching Introductory Statistics. He has published extensively on various topics in statistics and mathematics with his undergraduate and graduate students. He was named the 2015 Lamar University Scholar in recognition of a lifetime of outstanding scholarly and creative achievements. He also received Lamar University’s 2015 Julie & Ben Rogers Community Service Award and the 2016 Fulbright International Education Administrator Award to France by the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. He was a 2018 Fellow of the American Council of Education. He was a 2022-23 Fellow of APLU’s Council of Research. He is the elected Academic Co–Chair of the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceutical (NIIMBL) Workforce Advisory Committee. Over his career, Dr. Das has been involved with over $4 million in research grants and contracts as a PI.