Visiting chemist offered full-time position

By: Natalie Pistole
Contributing Writer

The Monmouth College chemistry department is reconstructing. After two professors left on short notice last year, Peter Gebauer, chair of the chemistry department, was forced to look for replacements. After deciding to settle with a one-year contract for the candidates, he set out looking.

Luckily for him, and Monmouth College, he found a woman by the name of Laura Moore.

Moore was interviewed last spring for the visiting position at Monmouth, where she would eventually be asked to spend one year as a visiting assistant professor of chemistry. After going through one semester of the year, Moore decided that she would apply for the ten-year contract as a biochemistry professor.

Recently, Moore was granted this position. Gebauer treated her as he would any other candidate, and did not hold back on the search for the new professor just because he knew he already liked Moore.

“Laura was clearly the best candidate. Even on paper, whether we knew her personally or not, she seemed to be the best for the job,” Gebauer stated. “I think it’s important that people know that we did a full-on, nation-wide search. We didn’t do it half-heartedly, secretly knowing that we were going to hire Laura, and she still came out on top.”
Moore, a graduate of Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., comes from a very small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan where she was surrounded by science growing up. Her father has a Ph.D. in genetics, her mother is a microbiologist and her brother is a veterinarian. But what really got her started in the sciences was her family’s mink farm. Moore said she has lots of “fond memories” vaccinating the mink, and believes that may be what sparked her interest in science from the beginning. It seemed clear that she should be involved in science as a profession.

So, when Moore was offered the job at Monmouth College, she was more than pleased, saying, “There is lots of potential to build all aspects of the chemistry department here at Monmouth. I feel like out of the options [other job offers] that I had, the opportunities here were best for me.”

She is especially excited to be a part of the new science building which will hopefully be completed on campus in the next 10 years. She also stated she enjoyed being able to talk to the architects and to give her input, as a professor, of how the layout should be.

Aside from the new science building, Moore is also very happy with teaching at a small liberal arts college and being able to interact with the students on a more one-on-one basis. With the upper-level classes she will teach next year, Moore plans to put more active learning into the classroom.

About active learning, she commented, “With Chemistry, you learn best by doing, so if you can work on problems in class, you can learn by doing.”

Another goal she wants to achieve while at Monmouth is to establish a summer research program where the science students of Monmouth can work on campus over the summer break. “Audra [Sostarecz, an assistant professor of chemistry] and I have a lot of fond memories from college from these summer research programs, and we want that for the students here as well.”

This summer research program would not only be for the chemistry students of Monmouth, but all of the science departments could take part in it.

As next semester approaches, Moore will be able to reintroduce herself to the campus as a biochemist. With one year of experience on campus behind her as a visiting professor, the chemistry department hopes her reintroduction keeps her here for a long time.

Despite the excitement of hiring Moore, the chemistry department is not done. They are currently in the process of hiring another physical chemist. “We have had some people on campus recently and are pleased with them. We plan on making offers to them.” Gabauer reported.