10th Eurovariety in Chemistry Education 2023

Invited speakers

Roy Shenhar (Photo: Yoav Dudkevitch)

Roy Shenhar is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Institute of Chemistry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and heads the laboratory for Polymer-Based Nanomaterials Assembly since 2006. He earned his degrees (B.Sc. in Chemistry and Computer Science and Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry) from the Hebrew University, and shifted to polymer science for his postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst and the Technion. His group develops assembly strategies for photonic and biomedical applications, and novel materials based on supramolecular polymers for sustainable economy and 3D printing. 
Prof. Shenhar has been teaching General Chemistry for Biology for the last 16 years. Additional courses include Advanced Organic Chemistry and Introduction to Polymer Science. Besides being an avid instructor, Prof. Shenhar also heads the Teaching Technologies unit of the Teaching and Learning Center of the Hebrew University. In 2019 he co-edited with Prof. Ron Blonder (Weizmann Institute of Science) a Special Issue of the Israel Journal of Chemistry that was dedicated to Chemistry Education, in an attempt to communicate the knowledge generated by research in Science Teaching to chemistry educators. In early 2020, during the outbreak of COVID-19, he managed the transition of the Hebrew University lecturers to online teaching. This period also provided him a wonderful opportunity to adapt his General Chemistry course for flipped classroom delivery, which gained him first-hand – and very rewarding! – experience with advanced pedagogies.
 

Ivo Leito

Ivo Leito, professor of analytical chemistry at University of Tartu (Estonia).

Ivo teaches analytical chemistry and metrology in chemistry at all study levels and organizes short training courses for practitioners on different topics of analytical chemistry and metrology in chemistry. His research work embraces a wide area of topics ranging from studies of superacids and superbases to LC-MS analysis. He is the initiator of the Erasmus Mundus program Excellence in analytical Chemistry (https://www.analyticalchemistry.eu) as well as web-based MOOC courses on measurement uncertainty in chemistry (https://sisu.ut.ee/measurement/uncertainty) and LC-MS method validation (https://sisu.ut.ee/lcms_method_validation/).