Minard Retires After 30 Years at Penn State

22 June 2004 --Robert D. Minard, senior lecturer in chemistry, has retired after 30 years at Penn State. Having served the last 16 years as director of the Organic Chemistry Instructional Laboratories, he considers the creation of an instructional program that is highly valued by students to be among his greatest achievements.

Upon taking the position of director of the instructional laboratories in 1988, Minard wanted to completely revitalize and modernize the chemistry-lab courses, making the lab environment safer and more “environmentally friendly.” His first objective was converting to a microscale approach to experimentation, reducing amounts of chemicals used to the minimum level at which experiments can effectively be performed and using much smaller versions of glassware and equipment. This approach has become prevalent in modern industrial research laboratories. It is more economical, in terms of chemical purchase and disposal, and reduces chemical exposure to both students and the environment. It also allows for errors, and error correction, without excessive waste or loss of time.

Minard next turned his attention to creating an Instrument Room for undergraduates in the Chemistry Resource Center, which involved acquiring modern spectroscopic and chromatographic instrumentation to be used in all lab courses. The instruments are intended to be used by students on a “walk-up” basis, without prior training. To this end, Minard and his colleagues, including undergraduate student Andrew Blum, designed computer programs to guide students through the process of acquiring their own sample analyses. The programs are called CALIOPEs—Computer-Assisted Lab-Instrument Operation and Principles Explanation systems—and have been developed for gas chromatography and nuclear-magnetic-resonance equipment. Other instruments that do not yet have CALIOPEs have illustrated step-by-step instruction sheets to guide students through instrument operation. These efforts are intended to help students focus on structure, reactivity, and properties involved in their experiments, rather than focusing only on techniques.

Part of the time that Minard was director of the Instructional Laboratories, he also directed the Mass Spectrometry Facility where, from 1973 to 1998, he worked to build and maintain a facility that would produce the thousands of quality mass-spectral analyses required for the high-calibre research that is conducted at Penn State. Under his direction, this facility underwent major modernization and revitalization.

In recent years, Minard has been chair of the advisory committee for the HUB-Robeson Aquarium, as well as curator of the aquarium. This attractive public display, the senior gift from the Class of 1999, is a living laboratory for students from many Penn State courses and from public schools in the area. Minard and Sanjay Joshi, professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering, were not content merely to maintain this complex reef system. With their students, they also set up equipment to continually analyze the chemical balance of the tank, and to provide real-time chemical data as an additional resource for academic programs within, and outside of, the University. Among the scientific goals they want to achieve are identifying the components of the sea foam that comes off the filter and determining what signals corals are responding to when they all spawn at the same time. While he plans to continue as curator, Minard hopes to train someone to eventually take over management of the facility.

Minard is a member of the American Chemical Society and is actively involved with its Central Pennsylvania Section. He has served as secretary, chairman, and councilor of that organization in the past, and continues as alternate councilor and as a member of its Steering Committee. He has been a reviewer for several scientific journals, including Analytical Chemistry, Analytical Letters, Bioorganic Chemistry, Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Research, the Journal of Chemical and Engineering Data, Organic Geochemistry, the Journal of Chemical Education, Origin of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, and the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Minard is a Faculty Fellow for the Schreyer Institute for Innovation in Learning and has served on the Schreyer Honors College Technology Planning Committee. He also is a member of the Chemical Education interest group of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), and the academic-computing networking group, “Network of People.” He has served on the University Faculty Senate, the University Committee on Curricular Affairs, the Academic Information Systems Strategic Work Group, and the Advisory Board of Educational Technology Services. He has been involved with the Center for Environmental Chemistry and Geochemistry, and with the Penn State Astrobiology Research Center. He also has been active with many committees and work groups within the Department of Chemistry.

He regularly participates in the Astrobiology Experimental Activities, a program for high-school students offered by the Women in Science and Engineering Institute. He was a co-organizer of the Astrobiology Summer Workshop for Teachers from 1999 to 2001. For more than 25 years he has been the advisor of the Nittany Chemical Society—a local student affiliate of the American Chemical Society—and the Penn State Marine Science Society.

Minard enjoys sharing his enthusiasm for chemistry with children. He was a counselor and co-director for Chem Camp for Kids in the early 1990s, and has co-directed Project FLASK—Fun and Learning Activities in Science for Kids— for several years. Some of his fondest memories are of working with students in the Nittany Chemical Society on programs for children, such as a Halloween Chemistry Magic Show and hands-on projects such as making ice cream using liquid nitrogen. His interest in students and education extended beyond the classroom when he served as director of the State College Area School Board for four years.

Minard has received a University Faculty Associate Award and a Provost’s Award from Penn State, a C.I. Noll Teaching Award and a Distinguished Service Award from the Eberly College of Science Alumni Society, and a duPont Teaching Award from the University of Wisconsin. He has published more than eighty scientific papers and has written all or part of five books. In addition to presenting papers at technical and professional meetings, he has given many invited talks, including those he delivered as a visiting scientist and lecturer in Pakistan and China under a National Science Foundation International Travel Grant.

Prior to coming to Penn State in 1973, Minard was a research associate and assistant professor at the University of Illinois from 1970 to 1973, and had been an assistant professor at the College of the Virgin Islands in 1968 and 1969. He was a research assistant at Cornell University from 1966 to 1968, and was a teaching assistant and research assistant at the University of Wisconsin from 1963 to 1966. He served as a summer research intern at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1963, and as a National Science Foundation Undergraduate Research Fellow at St. Olaf College in 1962.

Minard received a bachelor’s degree cum laude in Chemistry from St. Olaf College in Minnesota in 1963, and a doctoral degree in synthetic organic chemistry from the University of Wisconsin in 1968. He then held a postdoctoral position in organic and analytical chemistry at the University of Illinois in Chicago from 1969 to 1970.

His retirement plans include continuing his quest to understand the chemistry of the origin of life and helping with teaching improvements at Penn State, such as presenting a Professional Development Workshop for incoming graduate students and helping to keep instruments and computer resources up to date.

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