An outreach project has been initiated at three area community colleges to encourage students at two-year institutions to pursue four-year degrees in chemistry. Simple experiments have been designed, packaged and distributed to the community colleges that provide the students with the basic components to run experiments. The only additional resources that the students need are standard solvents and stirring hotplates which are readily available in community college teaching labs. As a simple first experiment, students are asked to grow single crystals of a commercial compound whose crystal structure is not known. Any crystals obtained are run on a diffractometer at UMass Dartmouth and students have the opportunity to observe data collection and learn about crystallography. Students are then provided with organic ligands prepared at UMass, which they combine with metal salts and attempt to isolate single crystals of the resulting complexes. The implementation of these experiments is done in collaboration with the community college faculty as primary research supervisors. The complexes that the students are preparing are new, so they are developing primary research results, and are part of a broader research agenda with the UMass researchers. The program design, implementation, and assessment will be discussed.

Community college outreach through crystallographic research

256th National Meeting (2018)

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