This website is a summary of my favorite community service activities and chemical education philosophy. Please see my CSUN webpage for information about my employment.
LAPD HazMat Unit
The health and welfare of my family and friends are tremendously important! To help ensure their safety, I serve as a Specialist Reserve Officer with the LAPD HazMat Unit. My expertise as a chemist comes in handy. I am basically a consultant/technical reference for my colleagues-- an unsung group of dedi-cated guys who put their lives on the line every day. Working with them is an honor! It's not all work though when we meet as part of the Consortium of Technical Responders. I've been lucky enough to go where few others can and do things few others should. Here's to Mark, Matt, Jon, Eric, Ryan, Karen, Craig and James! Special thanks to Officer Frutos who recruited me into the LAPD HazMat Unit.
Science/Chemical Education and Literacy
Scientific literacy will promote and help to maintain a well educated and thriving society and culture. The "double-edged sword" nature of technology (the appli-cation of scientific data/knowledge) is not as well appreciated as it should be in this day and age of ubiquitous tech-nology. I serve the community to promote scientific literacy in two ways: through chemical education and combating the proliferation of pseudo-science.
As a chemical educator since 1983, I have been teaching in one way or another- from high school to post-doctoral levels, from public present-ations to business/industrial workplaces. Currently, I teach "on-the-side" as an Adjunct Professor of Chemistry at Los Angeles City College (LACC). There I have been teaching Chemistry 51 (Fundamentals of Chemistry- our one-semester General, Organic and Biochem-istry (GOB) course) for a number of years. Many students take this minimal science (with lab) course with trepid-ation and fear due to feelings of inadequacy. As much as it would be great to convert students into enthus-iastic scientists, my goal is to get them to be able to think analytically- a skill that will serve them well even if they don't remember much if any of the various chemical topics covered. The most rewarding aspect of teaching is seeing students succeed when they thought they couldn't!
The appalling lack of scientific literacy within our society is only part of the larger issue at hand. The misrep-resentation or worse, the deceptive application of scientific information, can be more destructive as this can create an aversion to or outright fear of anything scientifically related. On the other hand, the witch-hunt by “skeptics” and “debunkers” for the “truth” leads to little if any room for independent thought, creativity or even faith. The advance-ment of science and technology is a double-edged sword. A clear example of the perversion of scientific data is presented and then an exploration of what pseudoscience is and what it is not is presented in my article entitled, Water, Water Everywhere- Caveat Emptor, Buyer Beware!