Atomic Hydrogen Interaction with Transition Metal Surfaces: A High-Throughput Computational Study.

Hydrogen adatoms are involved in many reactions catalyzed by Transition Metal (TM) surfaces, such as the Haber-Bosch process or the reverse water gas shift reaction, key to our modern society. Any rational improvement on such a catalyst requires an atomistic knowledge of the metal↔hydrogen interaction, only attainable from first-principles calculations on suited, realistic models. The present thorough density functional theory study evaluates such H interaction at a low coverage on most stable surfaces of , , and TMs.

A CURE on the Evolution of Antibiotic Resistance in Improves Student Conceptual Understanding.

We developed labs on the evolution of antibiotic resistance to assess the costs and benefits of replacing traditional laboratory exercises in an introductory biology course for majors with a course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE). To assess whether participating in the CURE imposed a cost in terms of exam performance, we implemented a quasi-experiment in which four lab sections in the same term of the same course did the CURE labs, while all other students did traditional labs. To assess whether participating in the CURE impacted other aspects of student learning, we implemented a second quasi-experiment in which all students either did traditional labs over a two-quarter sequence or did CURE labs over a two-quarter sequence.

Assessing how well students understand the molecular basis of evolution by natural selection.

Researchers have called for undergraduate courses to update teaching frameworks based on the Modern Synthesis with insights from molecular biology, by stressing the molecular underpinnings of variation and adaptation. To support this goal, we developed a modified version of the widely used Assessing Conceptual Reasoning of Natural Selection (ACORNS) instrument. The expanded tool, called the E-ACORNS, is explicitly designed to test student understanding of the connections among genotypes, phenotypes, and fitness.