Paul Mayer: Striking a chemical equilibrium

Paul Mayer

Even the best of students would be put off by a notoriously difficult third-year quantum mechanics course, which had one of the highest dropout rates in the entire Department of Chemistry. When Professor Paul Mayer began teaching it a few years ago, he met the problem head-on. He coached students through the math basics they needed to tackle the more sophisticated theory behind the complex subject.

As a result, more students stayed in the course and found that they understood the subject better. The outlook of participants was transformed along with the curriculum.

Inspired by this success, Mayer looked for other places in which students could similarly be brought up to speed. He set up a new fourth-year laboratory course on instrumentation and, more recently, introduced an advanced analytical chemistry course.

�It opens up an area of chemistry that they would otherwise be blind to,� Mayer explains. �It�s an eye-opener for them, and it�s an eye-opener for what lies out there for them after they graduate.�

Such innovative efforts have earned him a 2005 Excellence in Education award from the University. Department of Chemistry chair Alain St-Amant considers the distinction to be well earned, given the many challenging courses in physical and theoretical chemistry Mayer has taught since arriving at the University in 1998.

�He has excelled both in a small-class setting and a large-class setting,� observes St-Amant. �Professor Mayer has the ability to take the most complex mathematical and physical concepts and break them down in such a fashion that the student can be taken in a logical progression from start to finish. Also, he strives to ensure that at the end of the course, the students have learned something that can be of great value to their future careers, even if it be in another field of chemistry or science.�

For his part, Mayer is eager to apply the $7,000 award toward researching further teaching innovations. He intends to look for ways of enhancing the potential of undergraduate laboratories, to provide students with a taste of serious research methodology that surpasses the current �cookbook� approach. The goal is to enable students to distinguish for themselves what can be readily found in textbooks and � more importantly � what can only be determined by experimentation.

�That�s where the problem-solving starts, looking at chemical structure and properties and putting them all together, which is what chemistry�s all about,� he says. �It�s not about looking stuff up in tables and writing numbers down. Learning how to problem solve: you can�t look that up in a book.�