Bios

Leah McEwen is the Programmatic Coordinator for the Edna McConnell Clark Physical Sciences eLibrary and the Chemistry Librarian at Cornell University.  Her background is in biochemistry and library science and she is responsible for library resources and specialized services supporting chemistry in all fields and science and technology studies at Cornell.  She has contributed to and served in advisory capacity for a number of information resources including the ACS Style Guide, the ACS CPT Guidelines for Bachelor’s Degree Programs, Cornell’s VIVO, and CAS’ SciFinder.  She is an active member of the Chemical Information Division of the American Chemical Society, most recently as Secretary as well as Program Chair, addressing a wide range of topical interests from open access to advanced training and education to intellectual property and licensing to data- and text-mining.  She is also a member of the ACS Joint Board-Council Committee on Publications, the adjoining Subcommittee on Copyright and the Chemical & Engineering News Editorial Board. 

I am an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at The University of Minnesota Rochester's “Center for Learning Innovation”. I am interested in figuring out in what ways technology can help learning and it what ways it hinders it. I have authored several web platforms that make use of graphical interfaces to learn chemistry. Models 360 is a collection of several hundreds of molecules, where properties such as structural symmetry, vibrations and electrostatic maps can be displayed with the Jmol applet. More recently, I developed ChemEd X Data as a graphical tool to help students navigate through large amounts of chemical and physical data and build their own knowledge by figuring out on their own trends and exceptions. I am also interested in assessing how much learning or how different the learning is when we move from a face-to-face classroom environment to an interconnected computer environment. This is why I am thrilled to be part of the OLCC project and learning in what ways the new communication technologies can overcome the current barriers of our educational system.

  I am a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock with a focus on the use of computers in Chemical Education.  I am interested in how digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) are changing the way our society shares and communicates information, and the impact this is having on chemical education and the practice of science.  I currently serve as Chair of the ACS Division of Chemical Education's (CHED) Committee on Computers in Chemical Education (CCCE), and see the Cheminformatics OLCC as an opportunity for the CCCE to contribute to the advancement of science by providing a mechanism for the integration of these new and evolving technologies into the chemistry curriculum.