Molecular modeling has been used at Reed College for the last 7 years to teach undergraduate courses in chemistry. During this time, modeling activities have expanded from a small enterprise involving two workstations and two courses to a much larger one involving 18 workstations and nearly all chemistry courses. Students currently get "hands-on" use of molecular modeling tools in most courses using a variety of software tools.
1990 - "A Graphics Workstation in the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum", NSF-ILI grant. Department purchases SGI Personal IRIS workstation.
1990 - "Development of a Predictive Toxicology for Gene Toxic Chemicals", R.J. Reynolds grant. Department purchases IBM RS6000 workstation.
1990 - Workstations used to generate models for use in organic chemistry, advanced structural organic chemistry, and biochemistry courses. Software: MIDAS and SPARTAN.
1991 - Department accepts first senior thesis based entirely on computational chemistry (M.A. Haendel, "Designing Drugs: A New Method Using MEPs in Constructing QSAR").
1992 - Department moves into new Arthur F. Scott Chemistry Building. The building contains a lab dedicated to computational chemistry. All labs, offices, and classrooms are connected by means of campus ethernet network.
1993 - "Experiments in Computational Organic Chemistry", Hehre, Burke, Pietro, Shusterman, Wavefunction, Inc., Irvine, CA.
1993 - "Using Models to Develop 'Chemical Intuition'". NSF-ILI grant. Department replaces workstations with 8 SGI Indigo workstations (6 are installed in computational chemistry lab)
1995 - "A MIDAS Tutorial", Glasfeld, University of California, San Francisco (World Wide Web publication).
1996 - "Using Virtual Laboratories to Enhance Undergraduate Science Instruction", Keck Foundation grant. Department purchases 12 SGI Indy workstations and Challenge file server. Department is now equipped with 12 workstations in computational chemistry lab, a workstation on each faculty desk, 1 WOW (workstation on wheels) for lecture and classroom use, and one file server.
1996 - "A Laboratory Book of Computational Organic Chemistry", Hehre, Shusterman, Huang, Wavefunction, Inc., Irvine, CA.
1997 - Modeling software in current use: SPARTAN, MIDAS, Insight II, Jaguar (previously PS-GVB), Gaussian94, Macromodel.