Prepare with CARE

Project Description

Each year the Chemistry department teaches service courses in General, Organic, and Biochemistry to students from a multitude of departments. For many of these students, the five-course sequence (two general chemistry, two organic chemistry, and one biochemistry course) is either required for their major or their pre-health aspirations. As with many disciplines, while these courses approach the topic of chemistry from very different perspectives, they nonetheless rely heavily on a foundation of pre-requisite skills that are taught in the previous courses.

Currently, students are expected to review and re-learn important pre-requisite skills on their own, and the resources for doing that crucial review can oftentimes be difficult to locate. The goal of this project is to help students to Prepare with CARE (Chemistry Advising Review E-learning) for their upper-level chemistry courses.

In the first stage of the CARE project, novel content (videos, worksheets, self-paced learning assessments) will be developed, assessed, and deployed to support students in Organic chemistry at Boston University. The eventual goal is to have a fully-functioning suite of materials that will enable faculty and students to select and utilize carefully curated and targeted materials for getting ready for upper-division courses.

Project Team

Binyomin Abrams

Binyomin Abrams is the Director of General Chemistry and Master Lecturer in the Chemistry Department at Boston University. He graduated with his Ph.D. from New York University, and has been a faculty member at BU since 2008.

Dr. Abrams’s primary interests are in teaching chemistry and research in the field of chemical education—developing novel approaches for teaching chemistry and studying how students best learn. He has developed new courses in the Chemistry department, in the Core Curriculum of the College of Arts and Sciences, and interdisciplinary courses with the departments of Biology and the undergraduate program in Neuroscience. In 2010, he received the Templeton Award for Excellence in student advising from the College of Arts and Sciences and, in 2015, Boston University awarded him the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Surya Pulukuri

Surya Pulukuri (CAS ’21; MED ’25) is a junior at Boston University, majoring in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and is part of the Modular Medical Integrated Curriculum (MMEDIC) program. After completing General Chemistry (CH109 and CH110) in his first year at BU, Surya was selected to become a learning assistant for general chemistry labs (CH109/110) and then general chemistry discussions (in CH101 and CH102).

In addition to his work as a learning assistant, Surya also engages computational research in immunology, modeling viral protein-protein interactions in the context of HIV. In his free time, he enjoys playing/teaching chess, making or designing origami, and exploring the wilderness.