Peter Hoare

Peter is currently the Chemistry Outreach Officer in the School of Chemistry, Newcastle University, UK. He completed his BSc in Chemistry in 1984 and his PhD in Organic Fluorine Chemistry in 1989, both at Durham University, UK. He then completed a PGCE (school teacher training) at Newcastle University in 1989 and then embarked on a high school teaching career for 20 years at a successful and high attaining school in Northumberland. In 2008 Peter was seconded for 12 months to the School of Chemistry at Newcastle University as a Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) School Teacher Fellow to look at transition issues from high school to university chemistry and outreach. During Peter's Fellowship year, the new Head of School was suitably impressed by Peter's activity with local schools to create a new post of Chemistry Outreach Officer, to which Peter was appointed after a competitive interview process in September 2009. He works with many local and region schools, both enthusing students about chemistry and providing opportunities to enhance their school chemistry learning experience and also providing professional support to chemistry teachers. Peter has developed and delivers a range of high quality outreach activities, including a range of interactive demonstration lectures for a range of audiences, laboratory practicals, Spectroscopy Tours, Revision Workshops for A-level Chemistry (he has been a marker for one of the major English Examining Boards for the past 21 years) and is the coordinator of the RSC's Spectroscopy in a Suitcase scheme for North East England, which provides portable IR and 1H NMR spectrometers to run hands-on workshops in schools. Peter also delivers activities in primary schools too. Since 2011 he has also supervised the development of peer-produced (high school summer project students or final year undergraduate project students) web-based learning and teaching resources in collaboration with the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC), Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and a US developed, browser-based computational chemistry interface, WebMO. He has attended the last two BCCE conferences in Michigan (2014) and Colorado (2016) to give talks and run workshops to showcase the resources.