From June 20-23,2018, IONiC and UM-Dearborn were pleased to host nine inorganic faculty, 2 senior graduate students and one post-doc (seen above), from across the country at the IONiC VIPEr Summer workshop. This summer workshop was the first of a new model of summer workshops for IONiC, still supported by NSF (NSF IUSE 1726162, 1726133, 1725822), but with a narrower focus and a shorter length. In this case, we focused on the iron nitrosyl work of Professor Nicolai Lehnert (UM-Ann Arbor) as an example of the utility and appication of MO and Bonding Theory to current research problems.

We were, as always, inspired by our particpants: by their commitment to explore new pedagogies, to contribute to the body of public materials available on VIPEr for teaching inorganic chemistry, and to learn from each other. The workshop produced almost twice the expected number of LOs, and we suspect more may trickle in as our particpants get settled back in at home.  

I was also lucky to get to "break-in" a new workshop leader, Kyle Grice of DePaul University in Chicago. Kyle's been stepping up to handle social media and website maintenance for a couple of years since his own attendance at the 2014 workshop at Northwestern. We were glad to give him this new opportunity to do even more work for the community....

If you're looking for some new material for your inorganic class this Fall check out the workshop page. Keep your eyes and ears on BITeS for information about next year's workshop. Betsy Jamieson (Smith College) and Anthony Fernandez (Merrimack College) will be hosting somewhere in the Northeast corridor.