Promotion of Student Success and Positive Chemistry Course Perception through Frequent Metacognitive Reporting.

Explicit metacognitive interventions in undergraduate chemistry courses have been shown to improve student outcomes. Less studied have been the outcomes of students who implicitly and frequently practice metacognition and the resultant effects on the student-instructor relationship. In this project set within a large enrollment introductory chemistry course, we elevated student voice and enhanced student-instructor communication through weekly metacognitive reporting to study the characteristics of reporting students and their perceptions of the effects of metacognitive reporting.

Experimental studies of spiral wave teleportation in a light sensitive Belousov-Zhabotinsky system.

Cardiac arrythmias are a form of heart disease that contributes toward making heart disease a significant cause of death globally. Irregular rhythms associated with cardiac arrythmias are thought to arise due to singularities in the heart tissue that generate reentrant waves in the underlying excitable medium. A normal approach to removing such singularities is to apply a high voltage electric shock, which effectively resets the phase of the cardiac cells.

Propagating wave merging in a precipitation reaction.

Propagating precipitation waves are a remarkable form of spatiotemporal behavior that arise through the coupling of reaction, diffusion, and precipitation. We study a system with a sodium hydroxide outer electrolyte and an aluminum hydroxide inner electrolyte. In a redissolution Liesegang system, a single propagating precipitation band moves down through the gel, with precipitate formed at the band front and precipitate dissolved at the band back.

Novel modes of synchronization in star networks of coupled chemical oscillators.

Photochemically coupled micro-oscillators are studied experimentally and computationally in star networks to investigate the modes and mechanisms of synchronization. The micro-oscillators are catalyst-loaded beads that are placed in catalyst-free Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) solutions. The properties of the photochemical coupling between the oscillators are determined by the composition of the BZ reaction mixtures, and both excitatory coupling and inhibitory coupling are studied.