My scholarly work is located in both chemistry, mathematics and the humanities. One area of reasearch spans topology and chemistry, designing molecules with intriguing topologies. The second scholarly space I inhabit sits on the border between chemistry and the humanities, where my interests center on how chemists work and how they understand the work they do.
I also write about chemistry for more general audiences, at my blog, The Culture of Chemistry, and occasionally for other outlets, such as Slate and Nature Chemistry. The recently published Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets include several of my essays, including one on the sugar of lead and you can listen to a recent interview about some of this writing at On The Media.
Theories of chemistry
What makes a molecule beautiful, to a chemist? Does it matter that chemists use the term topology in ways that a mathematician would not recognize? Does the design of the built space play a role in the gendering of science? As scholarly work in the humanities ought to do, my explorations of chemists’ approaches to their work are intended to provoke a “subtle altering of opinion about ideas long and securely held" and to help chemist to surface issues that effect the course of their work.
It is now possible for chemists to routinely probe questions of chemical structure and reactivity without recourse to a traditional laboratory. Advances in theoretical and computational chemistry have enabled chemists to extract reliable answers from calculations for many systems.
Scents and sensibility, Nature Chemistry, 7, 265-266 (2015).
Are corporations putting feathers in your food? Slate, 18 February 2015.
Sugar of lead, M.M. Francl in Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, ed. D. Goldstein, Oxford University Press, 2015. p 397
Sex and the citadel of science, M.M. Francl, Nature Chemistry, 3, 670-673 (2011).
Full CV here.
Michelle M. Francl
Professor of Chemistry
Computational And Theoretical Chemistry
B.S., University of California, Irvine, 1979.
Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, 1983.
Postdoctoral research, Princeton University, 1983-1985.
e-mail: mfrancl (the required symbol)brynmawr.edu