Natalie Foster Named Lehigh Lab Faculty Fellow

 

Chemistry Professor Natalie Foster has been named Faculty Fellow for the LTS-based Lehigh Lab for two years beginning in the spring 2008 semester. The role of the Fellow is to serve as motivator, mentor, and facilitator for other faculty wishing to incorporate more technology in their teaching and to advise the Director for Faculty Development and other LTS staff on FD initiatives. Professor Foster is the third Fellow, following Professor Jack Lule, Journalism, and most recently Professor Ed Gallagher, English. Like previous Fellows, Foster has a small office in the Fairchild Martindale Library Media Center.

Speaking about her teaching interests, Natalie says, “I'm interested in using the available technology to create an environment where learning can take place. In the large introductory course for freshmen, we're using Blackboard heavily to manage class notes, laboratory exercises for the studio, and weekly quizzes. We've changed the format of the class to incorporate a studio that is a combination of laboratory and recitation and gives the students in the class more direct experience than they had in the previous class with translating observations and theories into chemical statements describing the behavior of matter.”

A participant in the Clipper Project, she produced a version of introductory chemistry built around modules containing, text, audio and video materials as well as embedded quizzes, that can be used asynchronously over the web by students on or off campus. At the graduate level, she teaches a class in spectral analysis and experiments with combinations of satellite TV, streaming video, web-mounted materials and podcasts to deliver graduate level education to create collaborative experiences between on- and off-campus students. She is currently collaborating with Debra Field, Robert Cutler Professor of Practice in the Music Department, and Greg Reihman on a project to enhance private vocal instruction using podcasting and iTunesU.

In the research arena Foster has a long-standing interest in the behavior of porphyrins as potential diagnostic and therapeutic agents for the detection and treatment of malignancy. In 2005 she joined a team of three authors to revise the first edition of an introductory chemistry book to be published this spring by W. W. Norton and Co. Other recent publications have appeared in International Journal of Pharmaceutics, Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Computers and Education.

 --Sue Cady
 

Article posted February 2008
 

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