Alumnus Noah Haskin (M.S., ’22) returns to Illinois after launching his chemistry teaching career at his undergraduate alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University.
“There, I developed a passion for sharing my own passion for chemistry,” said Haskin, who will join the teaching faculty as an instructor.
Haskin said he is excited to apply what he has learned to the classroom here at Illinois. At Wesleyan, Haskin said he developed a curriculum that pushes students to not only understand chemistry concepts but also apply them.
With small teacher-student ratios at Wesleyan, Noah said his one-on-one interactions with students were beneficial for his development as a new chemistry instructor, because he could adapt his instruction and easily receive rich, qualitative feedback from students. He said his teaching philosophy focuses primarily on pairing intuitive mental models with frequent, challenging practice.
“My lectures encourage students to participate actively through contributing to in-class exercises and reflecting as a class on what makes content challenging,” Haskin said.
Some of his favorite moments, he said, are when a student learns to solve a new type of problem, or when a student gets excited about a topic and asks for information beyond the lecture material.
“For me, the enjoyment of teaching lies in making students successful, both in completing degree requirements and gaining the ability to see the world as a chemist does,” Haskin said.
Now at Illinois, Haskin will be teaching Chemistry 101 this fall, and he said he’s excited to begin his career at Illinois and step up to the challenge of delivering the same enriching instruction to larger classes.
Haskin first experienced the desire to dive deeper into chemistry while doing undergraduate research at Illinois Wesleyan, where he graduated with a degree in biochemistry. As an undergraduate researcher, he worked on the development of environmentally friendly catalysts for organic synthesis.
“The research lab was the inflection point where chemistry became a practice, rather than an abstract pursuit,” Haskin said.
That same drive to dive deeper led him to graduate studies in Chemistry at Illinois where he contributed to research on endosymbionts and oxidoreductase cofactor selectivity switching in the lab of Angad Mehta, assistant professor of chemistry, and T. M. Balthazor Faculty Scholar.
Haskin said working with microorganisms and the proteins they rely on is his favorite mental challenge.
“Manipulating microorganisms is somewhat of an art, as there are so many moving parts to play with: amino acid sequences of proteins, how those sequences are transformed into organisms as DNA, how that sequence is expressed, the growth conditions we use to make sure those organisms can do the job we ask of them. I enjoy that open-ended aspect of the work, it encourages creative solutions when things don't go the way you expect,” Haskin said.
During his graduate studies, Haskin also worked with Seyed Dastgheib, a chemical and environmental engineer at the Illinois State Geological Survey at Illinois. Haskin created reports and summaries of strategies for utilizing coal to create valuable conductive materials.
“It was great working with him. He took me in knowing that materials chemistry was far outside my expertise but encouraged me to lean into that outside perspective rather than feeling limited by it,” he said.
Haskin said the transition to materials chemistry from biochemistry helped expand his understanding of chemistry and shifted how he thinks about lab work and instruction, because creating reports and summaries in grant proposals challenged him to communicate technical data and methods to an audience that did not have expert knowledge in the field.
“I found I enjoyed that work just as much as I enjoyed time in the lab,” he said.
After finishing his master’s degree, Haskin continued working with Dastgheib for a year before accepting the teaching position at Illinois Wesleyan.
“I’m excited by the vast support offered to instructors at Illinois and I feel welcome by my peers,” he said.