Chloe Chen, SDSC Communications, contributed to this story
Oxnard College Chemistry Professor Wilberth Narvaez is utilizing allocations on U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) ACCESS resources to introduce computational chemistry to students in his general chemistry class at Oxnard College, a community college in Ventura County, California. Narvaez has been showing his students how to use the Expanse supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego to illustrate their chemistry studies.
“Our goal with our ACCESS allocations on Expanse at SDSC is to provide students in our general chemistry classes with skills to develop an atomistic point of view that will later help them better comprehend mechanisms and chemical properties in organic chemistry,” Narvaez said.
Before these students transfer to a four-year university, it is important for them to not only have experience with chemistry, but also access to tools that enable them to create simulations that visualize their work.
– Oxnard College Chemistry Professor Wilberth Narvaez
Students in Narvaez’s classes learn about the crucial theoretical and computational concepts necessary for complex calculations used in the field of computational chemistry. He said that one section of the class focuses on the quantum mechanics of electron bonding and molecular stability through the examination of molecular orbitals and potential energy curves/surfaces.
“We are also exploring the possibility of compounding physical lab experiments with the analysis of simulation data by combining the synthesis of a coordination compound with the visualization of ligand-field density functional theory data,” he said.
Find out more about how educators are using ACCESS in the classroom here.
Resource Provider Institution(s): San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)
Affiliations: Oxnard College
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): CHE230118
The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.