Roberta Day
Roberta Day received a B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, spent five years in the research laboratories of the Eastman Kodak Company in Rochester, NY, and then received a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After postdoctoral work sponsored by both the Damon Runyon Memorial Fund and the National Institutes of Health, she joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts - Amherst, rising through the ranks to Full Professor in the Chemistry Department. She initiated the use of on-line electronic homework in general chemistry at UMass, is one of the inventors of the OWL system, has been either PI or Co-I for several major national grants for the development of OWL, and has authored a large percentage of the questions in the OWL database for General Chemistry. Recognition for her work includes the American Chemical Society Connecticut Valley Section Award for outstanding contributions to chemistry and the UMass College of Natural Science and Mathematics Outstanding Teacher Award. Her research in chemistry as an X-ray crystallographer has resulted in the publication of over 180 articles in professional journals. She is now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and continues her work on the development of electronic learning environments for chemistry.
Bee Botch
Beatrice Botch is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Chemistry and the Director of General Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois, and her Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Michigan State University. She completed her graduate work at Argonne National Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Thom Dunning Jr. and was a post-doctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology working in the group of Professor William A. Goddard III. She taught at Southwest State University in Minnesota and Wittenberg University in Ohio before joining the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 1988. She is a co-inventor of OWL, the Online Web-based Learning system developed at the University in partnership with Brooks/Cole Cengage Learning. Along with colleagues Roberta Day and Bill Vining, she has helped to author most of the general chemistry content in OWL. OWL has been used by hundreds of thousands of college students across the nation to learn general and organic chemistry. Professor Botch has been principal investigator and co-investigator on a number of grants and contracts related to OWL development and dissemination. Current interests include the development of learning materials to help students succeed in chemistry and the creation of an interactive electronic textbook for general chemistry.
