Equipment: Building Chromatography and Mass Spectrometry Capacity to Enrich Student Experiences and Recruitment

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Educational Instrumentation (EI) proposal aims to increase student access to advanced chemistry instrumentation with the goal of increasing enrollment in upper-level chemistry courses. Hands-on use of instrumentation such as gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and high- performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) is rare at the freshman and sophomore level and is often only accessible to students engaging in extra-curricular research or internships.

This project aims to equitably provide hands-on instrumentation experiences by funding the purchase of new GC-MS and HPLC instruments and catalyzing the development of several new opportunities that utilize these instruments. This will begin by incorporating the use of these instruments in freshman-level general chemistry labs. Additionally, a 1- credit instrumentation course and a seminar with targeted advertising in the colleges Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) program that supports underrepresented students in STEM will be developed to provide students with even more opportunities for instrumentation exposure.

The project will investigate the impact of these experiences to better understand how earlier access to these instruments’ influences recruitment into upper-level organic chemistry and research courses at the college.

The first goal of this project is to increase the number of Columbia Basin College (CBC) students that gain hands-on experience with HPLC and GC-MS from a 2023-2024 baseline of 10 students to over 50 students annually by designing experiments utilizing these instruments in freshman-level general chemistry. These students will be surveyed to understand the impact of these experiences, especially on their plans for future chemistry course enrollment.

In an effort to expand instrumentation exposure to more students, the second goal of this project is to develop a quarterly instrumentation seminar and an annual 1-credit instrumentation course. The final goal of this project is to increase the enrollment in our sophomore level organic chemistry and chemistry research courses from a combined 2023-2024 baseline of 10 students to over 30 students annually.

These students will be surveyed to understand the impact of these hands-on instrumentation experiences, especially focusing on their intended degree, enrollment in future STEM courses, and career aspirations. More broadly, it is expected that the use of these instruments in research courses and course- based undergraduate research experiences will lead to the development of posters and presentations that can be disseminated at the college and at regional conferences.

The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.