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William Tucker's passion for chemistry was inspired by his high school teacher Gary Osborn. He left Maine to pursue Chemistry at Middlebury College, and after graduating in 2010 he decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Sandro Mecozzi, where he developed semifluorinated triphilic surfactants for hydrophobic drug delivery. After earning his Ph.D. in 2015, he took a fellowship at Boston University as a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow. There he co-taught organic chemistry while working in the laboratory of Dr. John Caradonna. In the Caradonna laboratory, he worked on developing a surface-immobilized iron-oxidation catalyst for the oxidation of C・H bonds using dioxygen from the air as the terminal oxidant. Throughout all of this work, his passion has always been for teaching and working with students both in and out of the classroom. He has been lucky for the past six years to work at Concord Academy, where his students have, through their questions, pushed him to think deeper and more critically about chemistry. Their curiosity inspires him, and their inquisitiveness inspired his writing.
Over the five decades of my life as a chemistry student and teacher, I have seen the pendulum sway back and forth many times in General Chemistry education; Some eras have favored intensely mathematical approaches, where the underlying chemistry is left up to the student to discover on their own, while at the opposite extreme, a far more empirical approach has been favored, in which the mathematical underpinnings are presented mainly as means of introducing quantitative problem solving. This text strikes an interesting and novel approach. Mathematical underpinnings are presented in “up front”, and then the author runs numbers through the equation in question to allow the students to see how it is connected to physical reality. One striking example of this approach is exhibited by the chapter on Intermolecular Forces. Every textbook I have taught from has treated this unit very empirically, simply pointing out trends, and then using these trends as a springboard into the topic in a very fuzzy way that leaves many unanswered questions. The Van Der Walls equation is typically presented at the end of the chapter, more for “show and tell”, or with a few parameter tables to use for equation plugging problems. Dr Tucker’s text presents this at first seemingly complex question right at the start of the chapter, and uses it to help students to understand how changes in disparate variables in molecular and atomic structure can change the strength of these forces. It feels like Dr. Tucker is speaking directly to students, sharing his insights, rather than merely reciting well known fact. A marvelous example of this is where the equation relating Gibbs Energy and the equilibrium constant is presented in Chapter 18. Once again, as well, by “running the numbers” with this equation, the students can come to grasp the incredible significance of this relationship. Another well-thought out section is where bonding principles are laid out in Chapter 9. Typically, Molecular Orbital theory, which is the actual reason why molecules can exist, is presented at the end, after Lewis Structures, VSEPR, and the Valence Bond model are presented. In this text, this important conceptual topic is presented immediately after Lewis Structure, and this provides a useful and intellectually rigorous framework for the other topics typically covered in the course of the General Chemistry bonding unit, Jeff Byers, Middlebury College
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