Chem Ed Researcher. Assistant Professor
@uncg_chem
. Founder of the Popova Research Group. Co-founder of the
@NCarolinaCER
. Value genuine human connection
It is official! 🥳 I just signed my letter of acceptance for the Assistant Professor position at University of North Carolina Greensboro! 🎉 I am very excited to join this fantastic school in August 2019 and look forward to establishing impactful research program
@uncg_chem
I’m happy to share that I went up for tenure early and starting August 1 I will be an Associate Professor ✨🚀✨ I am very grateful for everyone who supported me through this journey, including PRG, reviewers, colleagues, mentors, collaborators, UNCG staff, family, and friends 🌼
@PixScienceCo
My roommate laid an egg. I was not prepared to be a baby budgie mama! Then I went on the internet and found out that my roommates can’t produce fertilized eggs because they are different species of parrots. Whew! 😅 It doesn’t stop them from “dating” though 🙈🙈😅
Dear Twitter community, please help us spread the word about this study. If you are an inorganic chemistry instructor teaching symmetry, consider participating 🤓
Got my course evaluations. Here is one of many comments that touched my heart: “Dr. Popova genuinely cares for every student in her class. Her enthusiasm for teaching and learning bleeds into every lecture and I am so happy to have had such a positive female chemist role model.”
Our lit review of 40 years of research on chem textbooks just got published in open access! 🎉 If you are thinking of ideas for a new project, check out the implications for research for study ideas around chem textbooks
Finished my first semester as an assistant professor! Built a research group, a research space, we are already analyzing data and preparing for collecting new data. And the semester finished with me winning the small grant research award from UNCG RISE! Looking forward to 2020!
I’m excited to share that I was awarded a $345K NSF grant to conduct research in chemistry education. 🎉 Below is a picture of me and my team celebrating this award and our first year anniversary as a research group! Cheers! 🥂 For more details, see:
The Popova Research Group is bringing to
#BCCE2022
7 oral presentations! This is going to be the first in person
#CER
conference for Fridah, Tamera, and Zoie, and we are just so excited! Looking forward to it! 🤩
Thrilled to announce that
@TameraSJo
has officially earned her PhD in CER! Dr. Jones, here's to your bright future and the impactful contributions I know you will continue to make in the field and beyond. Congratulations! 🌟🎉
So excited for
@TameraSJo
who will give an invited talk at the 2023 Chemistry Education Research and Practice Gordon Research Seminar (GRS)! 🤩💃 Tamera will speak about the experiences of marginalized women pursuing doctoral degrees in chemistry
#risingleader
My orgo student gifted me a perfume he crafted with his recipe and described the compounds responsible for each aroma note. Even created original artwork of sand dunes using the stippling technique. He is going to grad school to Paris to make this his career 🤩
Honored to represent
#CER
as the 2022 JACS Au Early Career Advisory Board Member! Congrats again to
@Morgan_Howe42
, Melony Kim, and Sam Pazicni from
@PazicniLabCER
on the very first
#CER
paper published in JACS Au! Here's to many more!
We just announced our 2022 Early Career Advisory Board, with members from across the chemical sciences, and with a broad global representation. Check out this editorial to find out which influential scientists of the future are on this year's board:
Job opportunity alert! 🌟 We're looking for an enthusiastic postdoc to join our team on a new NSF-funded project 🚀 For details and application instructions, scan the QR code or click the link below. Your retweets are greatly appreciated! 🔄
Excited to share that we just celebrated our $2M collaborative NSF grant with K. Neiles and co-PIs D. Chase and
@MitchCroatt
, with just under $1M coming to UNCG! 🥳 The next step is to hire a postdoc for this project! For more details, feel free to check out our group's website
Our book chapter on student repr. competence and reasoning in ochem has been accepted for publication! Both reviewers rated it as top 25% when it comes to quality and both said “accept as is” with some minor suggestions from one reviewer. Grateful to reviewers and editors!
We have some fantastic news in the group! Fridah and
@shannahilborn
were awarded the 2023
@NOBCChE
Advancing Science Conference Grant! And Fridah and
@TameraSJo
were awarded the
@ACSGradsPostdoc
Bridge Travel & Professional Development Award! 💗🔥🎆
Just a moment ago, I learned that not one, but two of our group members won a TA award! I want to sincerely congratulate
@TameraSJo
on receiving the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award! 🏅🥳
Super stoked about this book that will be published around Christmas time! Thank you
@nik_kola82
and
@GingCER
for the invitation to contribute! Love your vision for this book! Looking forward to reading it! 📖
Huge congrats to Dr.
@Lu_Shi21
for being honored with the Distinguished Postdoctoral Researcher in Chemistry Award from the American Institute of Chemists! Your hard work and dedication to mentoring others in our group are truly inspiring! 🤩 ✨
First pictures of the PRG! 😊 Group members entered their office for the first time for their first qual coding session. To make the day a little bit more memorable and special, we had a mini red ribbon cutting ceremony and celebratory cupcakes! 🧁 Yey team! 🙌📚🧩🗂📝
My brilliant colleague
@nadjacech
posted this with a call to be mindful of our own biases. I echo this message and am re-posting this given that we are in a LoR writing season. I am lucky to mentor and learn from so many amazing women, so this research is very important to me!
We have some fantastic news in the group! Our undergraduate students Carly Beck and Zoe Edmonson each won the Dorothy Munroe Undergraduate Research Grant! 🥳🤩👏
It's the last week of
@LynieshaWW
working in our group. Lyniesha delivered much beyond my expectations for a postdoc! She is an outstanding researcher, a thoughtful educator, a fantastic team player, and a genuine human! Thank you, my dear friend! We are lucky to have had you💗
New publication alert from our group🚨 This is the first publication for Robin, Zoie, and Bailey! And congrats to the first author Dr.
@eshan_gurung
who was a visiting scholar in my group! Definitely a fruitful visiting scholar experience 😀
Email me with requests for removals (retirements), changes, or additions to the map. To be added, please send me a link to your Department's graduate program and specify whether your students pursue MS, PhD, or both in CER. Feel free to also share the website of your group
The google map of graduate programs in Chemistry Education Research is moving. Many thanks to
@Maia_Popova
@UNCG
for offering her leadership to host it! The map has been visited 4300+ times in just the last 5 years by the
#CER
and
#DBER
communities!
That feeling when you help an undergraduate student book a flight for a conference and they tell you afterward that this was their first experience booking a flight and… this will be their first flight… 🥺☺️
Huge congrats to Dr. Fridah Rotich for successfully defending her dissertation in Natural Products Chemistry under the guidance of
@nadjacech
, and in Chemistry Education Research alongside me! 🥳🤩 Extremely proud of Fridah's remarkable achievements at
@uncg_chem
! 🦸♀️✨
Really excited to see our work published! 😀 Given the longitudinal nature of this study, this project has taken 5 years of hard work from a team of 4 researchers. Congratulations
@AnnikaKraft_
,
@theonlyletteR
,
@MarilyneStains
! 🎉
My students and I are working on the most exciting research paper in my academic career so far! It feels like everything that we have learned so far is culminating into this manuscript. Get ready! The Interconnected Model of Representational Competence Skills is coming soon 🚨
I have so many plants that I’m always propagating some in my office. It’s becoming a nice tradition to give my organic chem students who come to office hours propagated cuttings 🌿 They are all naming their plants Maia. I’ll start suggesting they name them after organic molecules
Delighted to host at
@UNCG
a visiting graduate student from Germany from the
@graulichCER
group,
@AxelLangner
! 🤩 Axel will stay with us for the next two months to collaborate on eye-tracking projects. Welcome, Axel, to North Carolina and UNCG! 🇺🇸🤓🎉
Huge congrats to our
@shannahilborn
who passed her literature seminar! 🤩🥳👏 P.S.: For her seminar, Shanna chose to summarize and present the amazing work from
@vicatal
on teleological reasoning and heuristics. As shown from the practice talk pics, Vicente was crowned 👑
How can you tell that your student is very excited to give their first group meeting presentation? For example, when they dress up in a suite and tie, and even with cufflinks! 👔 P.S.: Dan Kunath knocked his first presentation out of the park! 😀🙌
Today was a fantastic day because we got to host Dr. Mike Stieff at UNCG! I am a big fan of Mike’s work. He definitely inspired some of my current research interests 🫶
Woke up this morning a PhD candidate!!! 🥳🥹So lucky to do work I love alongside some wicked smart people and stoked to see what the next couple of years bring!!
It was so fun to host Dr. Jack Barbera at UNCG! We had a lot of great conversations about things like measurement, psychometrics, PhET simulations, affective domain, etc. And a lot of laughs! 😊
Our Rehnuma and Liz had a big crowd for their talk at the undergraduate research symposium and received a lot of great questions! Whohooo! 🤓🤩 Huge congratulations to their mentor, PhD student
@TameraSJo
! 🫶 Such a powerful team right there!
It was so excellent to see such a packed room for the graduate students, postdocs, and early career faculty networking event! You know it’s going to be a full house when
@OCrandell
is in charge! Go
@BCCE2022
! 🤩
Congrats to
@LynieshaWW
for being awarded the American Institute of Chemists Postdoctoral Researcher Award! Lyniesha is very enthusiastic, extremely intelligent and skilled, and always willing to support others in the group! Could not wish for a better postdoc! So well deserved!
Had the pleasure of visiting and giving a talk at the
@USouthFlorida
! Thank you
@Jeff_Raker
for the invitation! Really enjoyed also connecting with Dr. Jennifer Lewis, Dr. Scott Lewis, and all the fantastic students in their CER program!
Someone I mentor just gave me candy: extra gum for going the EXTRA MILE, mint dark chocolate for my COMMITMENT, Reese’s for being the REASON UNCG is the place to be, mentos for my INVESTMENT in them, and starburst for them BURSTING with happiness working with me 😭🥰😭
Delighted to have hosted Dr. Jeff Spencer in our group meeting! He discussed his journey as an instructional coach and insights on K-12/post K-12 education. Key lessons: Don't lock yourself in one particular career and make career decisions through a lens of personal values 🔥🔥
I was a bit surprised to see a kettle in the bathroom. But this is what it’s like to have a respectful husband 😊 My office at home has 3 walls and no door. He wanted some tea while I was teaching so he boiled it in the bathroom to make sure he doesn’t make any noises 🤣
Normally I do not stick things on my devices but this occasion calls for an exception - one of the students from my organic chemistry class gave me this sticker because they noticed that I like tea and plants and because I made a positive impact 🌿☕️☺️
Shout out to
@TameraSJo
, a graduate student in our research group, who was just awarded the 2022
@NOBCChE
Advancing Science Conference Grant as “one of country’s best and brightest upcoming scientist”! 🌟🤩🎉
Love this photo of Fridah Rotich! P.S.: Fridah is a fantastic researcher who thinks deeply about theory. Come to her talk about student cognitive resources for making inferences about stability on Wed at 2:25 pm @ 204-Stewart
So proud of my undergraduate student Bailey Thompson doing such a fantastic job giving her first conference presentation and representing our research group,
@uncg_chem
, and
@UNCG
! 🤩
Really enjoyed my virtual visit and seminar at the University of Northern Colorado and the opportunity to connect with Drs. Corina Brown and Melissa Weinrich, and their students. Thank you for the invitation! 🤓
When the PI comes up with a new crazy research idea… the group follows 😂🤪 Thoroughly enjoying our time at
@LifeAtPurdue
! Excited to be here for
@BCCE2022
!
Thrilled to congratulate
@shannahilborn
on her well-deserved Forrester Award win, recognizing her outstanding contributions to
@uncg_chem
! A pivotal member of UNCG's
@NOBCChE
and the Department's DEIA committee, Shanna is dedicated to fostering an inclusive environment for all 🎉
Thrilled by the shout-out from my student, Logan Brown, who is now headed to grad school at Harvard! 🎓🤩👏 And looks like we are moving in the right direction when it comes to the reputation of Organic Chemistry 🧪💕
#ProudTeacher
#HarvardBound
Just boarded the plane to Savannah, GA to attend and present at the SERMACS conference. Looking forward to seeing my Southeastern
#CER
collegues and friends!
We have a lovely tradition in our research group - we go for our annual walk to see Greensboro’s Christmas balls in the Sunset Hills neighborhood ✨🎄❄️ It’s magical there! Unfortunately pictures don’t not capture it well
Bailey Thompson won the Undergraduate Research and Creativity Award! 🥳 Along with Zoie & Dan she uses eye-tracking to investigate how learners translate between various representations of molecular structure. Bailey’s goal is to pursue a career in scientific writing and editing
I got to meet
@tessa_andrews2
! 🤩 For years I have been recommending Tessa’s papers to my students as examples of excellently written qualitative papers. And now I know that she is not just a badass researcher and writer, but also a wonderful human!
Today one of my graduate students brought a concept map of trustworthiness criteria in qual research to our one-on-one meeting that she generated as she was reading a paper that I recommended! How awesome is this?!!! 😀 I think we will turn this into a wall art for the office!
We had such a fantastic group meeting yesterday with
@AxelLangner
facilitating an eye-tracking demo with
@roshangbhaskar
, and then examining example data from an undergrad chemistry learner 👁️🧠 It’s been an absolute pleasure to have Axel as part of our group this semester 🤩🇩🇪🇺🇸
Today, me and my graduate students took a road trip to Duke University to attend Dr. Talanquer’s
@vicatal
talk on reform initiatives in general chemistry. We got a wonderful opportunity to also meet and chat with Dr. Talanquer. We went back to Greensboro feeling inspired!
I had the great pleasure of visiting
@LynieshaWW
at
@IUPUI
and meeting her Department Chair
@ParthaBasu_Chem
! I am so excited about Lyniesha’s journey as an Assistant Professor and can’t wait to see all the great things that will come out of her research group! 🤩