Background about me:

• Born and raised in Monroe, WI (a small farm town in southern WI with 10,000 people and probably 40,000 cows)
  
• Graduated from Monroe High School (somewhere between average and just above average)
• Attended UWSP as a freshman directly out of high school as a chemistry student in Pre-Med
• Hated the thought of going into medicine and dropped out eventually working night shift at a convenience store (these were not my finest hours)
• Trained at Northeast Wisconsin Technical Institute in Green Bay, WI in their Jewelry Design and Repair Program
• Moved to Italy to live in an 11th century farm house in the mountains north of Florence for an apprenticeship with the Christian Brother Jerome Cox as a jeweler and sculptor
• Returned to my home town of Monroe and opened M.P. Zach - Custom Design Jewelry. My store specialize in hand crafted jewelry that I created, better quality commercially designed jewelry and repairs done in the shop. Many repairs were ones that other jewelers were not willing to try. Having a willingness to do tricky repairs helped build my skills and grow my business.
  
• Closed my retail store and worked part time continuing my jewelry business while completing my undergraduate degree at UWSP. I graduated in 1997 with a BS in  chemistry (ACS certified) and chemistry with a polymer option.
• Attended a great program for my MS and PhD in Chemistry at University of California-Irvine working with my advisor Dr. Reginald Penner. UCI has many great programs and I highly recommend it as a grad school. Following UWSP with a few years of warmer weather and palm trees is pretty nice. It is fun to poke fun at the locals for pulling out parkas when the weather drops below 68^oF.
• Served as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at University of California, Berkeley within the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department in the laboratories of Dr. Jill Banfield and at NASA-Ames Research Center with Dr. Jonathan Trent
• Accepted the Glenn Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellowship at Argonne National Laboratory in the Laboratory for Superconductivity and Magnetism
• Since graduating from UWSP, I have had numerous studies published and received nice recognition for my work. I put these here not to call attention to me, but to call attention to what you can do in a few years from now. As a Chemistry 105 student and a student at UWSP, you are only within a few months or years of making your own discoveries and doing some really cool things. When it comes to chemistry education, UWSP is not some small little college that is in the middle of nowhere. You are about to receive a great education that you can use as a valuable tool for your future. The student to faculty ratio at UWSP is a great advantage if you chose to get involved. You can go anywhere you want!
• This fall I have returned to my alma mater in the Chemistry Department of University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point to serve as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. I will retain a joint appointment as a Guest Faculty Researcher at Argonne National Laboratory so that I can enhance the research opportunities for my students. We will have access to some of the World's premier research facilities and scientists for selected experiments. In addition there is some wonderful instrumentation to conduct world class research right here at UWSP. There are so many cool things that we can do with the instrumentation that we have right here on campus. If there are instruments that we need that don't exist here, we can probably find it either within the UW system or at Argonne National Laboratory. The Chemistry Department at UWSP is great because there is a critical mass of experts in a variety of fields. Check out our faculty and their research interests.
  
• It is my goal to engage students in learning chemistry. My end goal is not to have anyone memorize a mess of disjointed facts for a test that will be forgotten soon afterwards, but to train my students to apply chemistry as a tool for whatever field they choose. Learning chemistry is not a goal in and of itself. Without being able to apply the raw knowledge, all the facts are useless. I want to also give them opportunities to apply what they use directly by providing opportunities to do undergraduate research. My projects are mostly in the electrodeposition field or in fundamental nanotechnology research.