iCID

John Gilbertson

(360) 650-2790 | CB 344

interactive Collaborative Inorganic Discussion (iCID)

left: Students surround a table, focused on a projection of molecules. The picture is labeled "WWU" right: students look at a screen. The photo is labeled "UM"

When students from diverse backgrounds approach research topics, their experience navigating the problem, approach, and interpreting data is often dependent on discussions with other group members or advisors. Learning chemistry content benefits from dialogue, and often it takes a team to hash out ideas and understand the problem being researched in the broader context. However, this experience varies from institution to institution, research group to research group, and advisor to advisor. For small groups, or groups from small research programs, this variance puts students at an educational disadvantage

Our mission is to provide a platform for students to engage in scientific discussions across multiple institutional levels (R1, R2, PUIs, MSIs) in order to facilitate in an open dialogue of how research questions are approached and data interpreted. One of the key points that students often miss is that science is dynamic: proposals are made, refuted, and refined. Research papers typically provide the best explanation to scientific questions with available data at hand. This interaction has inspired the vision that many groups from around the country can have a similar experience by attending a rotating literature discussion on contemporary topics in inorganic chemistry.

Please feel free to peruse the iCID presentations below:

Whar causes an inverted ligand field? Highly electronegative ligands increase the energy of the ligand orbitals. High oxidation state of metal help lower the energy of the metal d-orbitals