Associate Professor of Chemistry
Iowa State University, Ph.D.
Prof. Nordell Pearson came to Lawrence in the fall of 2000 from a two-year post-doctoral appointment at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She also taught for a year at Bucknell University. She teaches in the Principles of Chemistry courses sequence, Inorganic Chemistry, Materials Chemistry, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and a chemistry course for non-chemistry majors.
Professor Nordell Pearson has provided significant leadership to the Nanoscience and Nanotechnology at Lawrence (NNL) program. Professor Nordell Pearson and colleagues in the chemistry and physics departments have been awarded two grants from the National Science Foundation's Nanotechnology Undergraduate Education Program (2002 and 2005). These awards of nearly $300,000 have helped purchase new instrumentation, fund student research stipends, and facilitate the creation and integration of many new nanoscience lab experiments and activities into many Lawrence courses. In connection with the NNL program, Prof. Nordell Pearson has made more than 30 presentations and facilitated many workshops including three weeklong workshops during the summers of 2004 and 2005. In December, 2005, Prof. Nordell Pearson and her colleague George Lisensky from Beloit College traveled to Marrakesh, Morocco, to present a workshop on nanoscience and nanotechnology to the 2005 Africa Materials Research Society Conference. They will travel back to Africa in July of 2006 for additional nanoscience workshops in South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana.
Professor Nordell Pearson's research interests lie in the areas of solid-state, inorganic materials synthesis and characterization as well as nanoscience. Students working in her group have pursued a wide range of projects over the past several years. Briefly the three areas of research are: (1) the synthesis of compounds with novel structures in a new class of materials called coordination polymers, (2) the preparation and characterization of metallic, semiconducting and polymer nanoparticles, and (3) an interdisciplinary project investigating water quality issues in the Fox River basin. More than 20 students have worked with Prof. Nordell Pearson during the summers and the academic year and all of those students have made presentations of their research results at undergraduate research symposia around the country. Since coming to Lawrence, Prof. Nordell Pearson has published nine papers in peer reviewed research and education journals and presented or facilitated more than 50 seminars and workshops.
In 2004 Prof. Nordell Pearson was awarded Lawrence's Outstanding Young Teacher Award.
email: karen.nordell@lawrence.edu