Amber Carr
Posted about 7 years ago
Hello everyone! I’m really excited to read everyone’s introductions and to learn more about all of you. So here’s a little bit about me:
Since 2015, I have been working as a postdoc at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, CA. I am a computational/physical chemist by training, but my work has spanned so many disciplines that I don’t really know how to describe myself anymore! Currently, I work with experimental polymer chemists and materials scientists, using simulations to provide them with atomic-level details of the materials that they make in the lab. Some applications of the new polymeric materials that are being developed here include water filtration membranes, antibacterial coatings, and batteries. My work has focused on improving the properties of polymeric nanoparticles for use in targeted drug delivery. During my PhD work at Stony Brook University in NY, I focused on improving sampling algorithms for computer simulations of the protein folding process. My work has been in different areas, but the common themes that continually inspire me are phase transitions and critical phenomena, self-assembling and biologically inspired systems, and structure-function relationships in biological materials.
Although I am working in research right now, my real passion is for teaching. Following the completion of my PhD in 2013, I was a Science Fellow at Columbia University in NY, where I taught a Core Curriculum course for freshmen, entitled Frontiers of Science. Teaching Frontiers was incredibly fun because the course material is very broad, so I had the opportunity to teach areas of science that were new to me – neuroscience, paleontology, and astrophysics being among my favorites. The other faculty members came from many different areas of science, so I learned a lot from interacting with them. I have also been a faculty member in Citizen Science, which is a science-literacy course with a focus on infectious disease, at Bard College and Bard Prison Initiative. At the high-school level, I have taught and developed interdisciplinary STEM curricula for the YWCA and Upward Bound. Mentoring is very important to me, particularly with underrepresented student populations, and I currently work with the New York Academy of Science to administer two of their mentoring programs for young women in STEM.
I hope that I can help to make useful contributions to your classrooms! Some of my favorite lessons that I have developed for classes that I have taught in the past involve using the Protein Data Bank to discover protein structure-function relationships; participating in online citizen-science and gamification initiatives such as FoldIt, EteRNA, and NanoDocs; and using the Geneious software to trace the origins of HIV using bioinformatics approaches. I am more than happy to help your students make connections to “real-world” chemistry applications – particularly as a theorist, I have learned a lot from working in industry about current challenges that can be solved using chemistry.
When I had time for hobbies, I enjoyed learning languages, swimming, reading, and playing the harp and the viola. I’m going to be making an effort to slow down the pace of my professional life a little bit in the very near future so that I have more time for these things again!