The incorporation in the undergraduate teaching laboratory of experiments of direct relevance to a faculty member’s research program provides a powerful means to expose large populations of students to research occurring in their home departments. Such exposure provides an equitable means to encourage all students with an interest in chemistry to recognize the possibilities that might exist by joining a research laboratory early in their college careers. At a four year college the work performed in the undergraduate research laboratory should, essentially by definition, by transferrable to the teaching laboratories. In this spirit experiments have been developed that represent useful and direct contributions to, and continuations of, current research. Two examples will be described here. In the first a classical aromatic nitration is employed to prepare, and potentially harvest, useful quantities of a key intermediate material. In the second a viable protocol for the capture of a transient, reactive, species of biological importance is under investigation. The trajectory from research investigation to potential teaching laboratory application will be described, with the overarching research theme from which the work is drawn acting as a consistent backdrop.

Research–derived experiments for the undergraduate teaching laboratory

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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