Sonoma State Chemistry Professor and Chair Mark J. Perri, Ph.D, has been awarded $995,786 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to train faculty to use ChemCompute – a computational chemistry website for undergraduate education and research – and to build out the site itself.
ChemCompute, which Perri created, is a free web resource for undergraduate students that uses computer simulation to solve complex problems and facilitate computational experiments in advanced topics such as quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics, and data science analysis.
Free access to ChemCompute – through NSF’s ACCESS program – has enabled students at hundreds of universities, including Minority-Serving Institutions, to include computational calculations in their curriculum and undergraduate research without having to pay for license fees, maintenance costs, or textbook access codes.
Since 2014, over 110,000 students have performed 650,000 computational chemistry calculations using ChemCompute.
Perri plans to use the grant funding to improve the accessibility of the site, expand its capabilities for research, develop new curriculum, and create a community of faculty – drawing from the California State University (CSU) STEM-NET professional learning community – that will use the site in their classes.
Perri said that because almost all CSUs are Hispanic-Serving Institutions, the project aligns with strategies proposed by the NSF’s Broadening Participation in Computing effort. He will also provide training workshops for undergraduate faculty at other colleges.
“ChemCompute lowers the barrier for student use, including at two-year colleges, which are among the most diverse campuses,” Perri said. The platform is also useful on larger campuses, he said, where nearly half of faculty surveyed reported that availability of computer classrooms was an obstacle to teaching computational chemistry.
"I feel like I am reaching people, and the site will help students in developing new science and technology content for undergraduate research," Perri said.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under award number 2417553. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.