Dr. Suzanne Lunsford is professor at Wright State University and is an electrochemist and an internationally established chemical educator. She has been working with colleagues from international universities on how to integrate interdisciplinary science labs to meet the needs of the 21st century. Her research work for over two decades has been developing novel sensor electrodes (modified electrochemically) to detect common neurotransmitters to detecting common heavy metals Lead, Cadmium, Mercury and toxic metal Indium at low concentrations utilizing electrochemistry techniques such as cyclic voltammetry, square wave anodic stripping voltammetry, and differential pulse voltammetry. The electrochemical techniques and modified electrodes are examined further by such techniques as Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy and Raman Spectroscopy to confirm the electrode surface interactions and stability analysis of the sensor(s) developed to assist our students with a variety of analytical instrumentation techniques. She has received over 1 million dollars in external funding for her international and local educational inquiry-based science research programs at Wright State University.
Multi-disciplinary inquiry-based science activities /labs for our undergraduates and high school students are designed around noteworthy issues, tasks and questions and real-world problems to solve related to industry research. These real-world problems in inquiry-based labs require our students to utilize more than one discipline to solve their questions/problems. Our pre- and post-test assessments have shown that the multi-disciplinary approaches increase students’ capacity to make connections in STEM fields as needed to meet the 21st century skills for today. There are several multi-disciplinary modules that will be shared during the plenary talk that will show and discuss the problem –based activities with integration in the fields of study which require content use in all of the following areas of physics, chemistry, biology, geology, engineering and technology. Real-world problems related to industrial research will be discussed in my inquiry-based /problem solving labs are topics such as “the crisis of water contamination and what are the type of electrode sensors to detect heavy metals?”, “how to prevent corrosion” and “how to detect neurotransmitters –electrochemically and how to determine if the sensor is working”. These are the typical real-world issues that our undergraduate students were required to problem –solve while integration of technology with instrumentation such as Cyclic Voltammetry, Square Wave Anodic Stripping Voltammetry, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Raman Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, and X-Ray Fluorescence. The exploration of how industry resolves these research problems are integrated into our curriculum by field site visits to research labs such as Bowser-Morner and CEMEX. These industrial research visits allow our students to run novel instrumentation and learn real-world applications to solve their research problems with the 21st century technology.
