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 dedicated 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, John, Eric, Ryan and Bob (my Reserve Coordinator)!

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 application of scientific data/knowledge) is not as well appreciated as it should be in this day and age of ubiquitous technology. I serve the community to promote scientific literacy in two ways: through chemical education and combating the proliferation of pseudoscience.

As a chemical educator since 1983, I have been teaching in one way or another- from high school to post-doctoral levels, from public presentations 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 Biochemistry (GOB) course) for a number of years. Many students take this minimal science (with lab) course with trepidation and fear due to feelings of inadequacy. As much as it would be great to convert students into enthusiastic 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 misrepresentation 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 advancement 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!

My educational philosophy is based upon the axioms:

"Imagination is more important than knowledge!" -Einstein

"Knowledge is not power- it's what you do with knowlede- now that's power! " -Shin

About Dr. Shin

Dr. Paul Shin is the Chemical Instrumentation Manager at CSUN. He is a proud “banana slug” graduate of UC Santa Cruz, earned his doctorate at Colorado State University and conducted post-doctoral research at UCLA. He has worked in both academia and industry and refers to himself as an analytical bioinorganic chemist. His diverse background includes teaching chemistry at the high school through doctoral level.  A brief stint in industry as an applications engineer and then sales representative for Bruker BioSpin (NMR instrumentation) has provided invaluable experience that he passes along to his students. Taking things apart as a young boy (and hoping the item still worked with a few spare pieces) led him to his career as the caretaker of bigger toys. He combines these experiences in his commitment to education as Chair of the Educational Affairs Committee for SCALACS.

Why I do the many things I do

“You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.” -John Wooden (Thanks fellow Bruin JP Esser!)