Welcome to the home of LABMAN - faster than a
speeding electron, more powerful than a thermite reaction, able
to leap tall test tubes at a single bounce! LABMAN has seen over 14,000 students and teachers in the past
16 years doing
demonstrations at schools and workshops with teachers. My motto
is "Great Things Can Happen When The Chemistry's
Right".
I was sponsor of our chemistry club, XEM from 1993-2005 and helped supervise our outreach activities to the local schools. One of these activities is Kids and Chemistry, a program where students go into the surrounding schools and do "hands-on" activities or demonstrations with the students. If you would like to request a visit from LABMAN or our students e-mail me at robertsonr@apsu.edu and I will pass the request on.
I am also interested in helping students "do science", and I am currently director of the Middle TN Science and Engineering Fair (MTSEF). After a long run at Vanderbilt, this grade 6-12 science fair has now found a new home at APSU. It is affiliated with the International Science and Engineering Fair. I also directed the Montgomery County Science Fair from 1992-2003. Click here for more info about the MC fair.
Of course when I am not being LABMAN, I must find time to assume my other identity, mild-mannered general and physical chemistry professor at APSU. With the help of the education and physics departments, we have developed a course for pre-service elementary education majors under a grant from Project NOVA sponsored by NASA. This course is called "Introduction to Chemistry and Physics" and has been offered since the fall of 98. It originally was team taught between the chemistry and physics departments but now is taught solely by myself. I also have many of my NOVA class activities online that you can access. Other classes I teach are chem 1110 and lab, chem 1120, chem 1020, chem 3610 and lab, and chem 3620 and lab. I also am the pre-med program advisor at APSU. Pre-meds will especially want to investigate the pre-med advisement links.
My own research has been oriented toward the environmental world. For my M.A. degree I explored how one could clean up wastewater using a process called foam flotation. My Ph.D. work was mainly theoretical modeling of the process of micellization by surfactants (soap molecules). How big do these spherical aggregates get? How is their size a function of chain length, salt concentration, temperature and the like? I was part of an interdisciplinary research group which was developing another wastewater cleanup process called "surfactant flushing". Inject the soap, let it form micelles, the organic waste migrates to the interior of the micelle, and then remove the micelles and separate organic waste from micelle. Presto - you have cleaned up the site. It is easier said than done, but it does work.
With undergrads (including my son Kenneth) at APSU, we worked on a project dealing with the use and kinetics of phosphate anti-corrosives in municipal water supplies. Phosphates have been used for years very successfully and with no reported problems, but a resident of Dickson County has been diagnosed as being allergic to some types of these agents. We tried to find which municipalities use what type of phosphate agent and how the phosphate agents change into other forms in water. We used phosphorus NMR to see the products of the hydrolysis and to quantify their relative amounts for the kinetic analysis. See a project paper on our research by clicking here.
In my spare time I try to enjoy my 150 acre farm in Dickson County with babbling brook, beef cattle, a wife and two children. Hobbies include tennis, stamp collecting, and photography. Check out some of my favorite photos and snow pictures (see Jan. 2003 snow pics as well as Christmas 2004 in Quick Links above). I have a United Methodist Church background, but our family now attends Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Dickson, TN, where I am an elder and teach a Bible study class. I have also done some lay speaking from time to time in the Methodist Church. A speech I gave to the APSU faculty in May of 2005 pretty well summarizes my teaching philosophy and how it relates to my Christian faith. Also check out Kenneth's tracks of "The Air I Breathe" and "Word of God Speak" or his late 2005 album filled with original music "Eavesdropping" - all recorded at our church. My daughter Kaci also has a version of "Friends" (several years old now) that you can hear. Kenneth is on the keyboard on all tracks which are in MP3 format.
Come by and see me in Sundquist C303 on the APSU campus or give me an E-mail at robertsonr@apsu.edu.
