Welcome!
Dr. Bowers at Arches National Park.
This webpage is designed to share the research, teaching, and activities of Geoffrey M. Bowers.* For the latest news on group activities, click here. And if you are in the mood for creative fun, click here!
Brief Biography:
Dr. Bowers is an educator and scholar who has been teaching physical, general, and environmental chemistry topics at primarily undergraduate institutions since 2008. His research focuses on using solid-state NMR and other spectroscopic, thermal analysis, diffraction, and microscopic methods to study problems in physical geochemistry and the environment. Bowers group research involves primarily efforts to understand the structural and dynamical behavior of ions, H2O, and hydrophobic supercritical fluids at established and newly forming mineral-fluid, organo-fluid, and mineral-organo-fluid interfaces. He and his research students study how fluid and surface properties impact adsorption of ions and molecules as well as how chemical transformations of inorganic and organic materials are impacted by fluid films. Bowers involves undergraduates in these projects as often as possible and frequently collaborates with computational chemists to integrate the wet laboratory results with molecular modeling. Bowers is a recognized expert regarding fluid behavior at smectite clay surfaces, and the results of his group's studies have critically important implications in non-convention methane (shale gas, tight gas) extraction, CO2 mitigation, nutrient and carbon cycling, water cycling, environmental remediation, environmental transport modeling, nuclear waste remediation, industrial fouling, pollutant transport, etc. Several of the group's scholarly efforts have been funded by the United States Department of Energy, Office of Science, Geoscience program and involve close collaborations with scholars at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Bowers was the recipient of the Norton T. Dodge Award for Scholarly Achievement by a Junior Faculty Member at St. Mary's College of Maryland in 2019 and was nominated by his colleagues for the Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation in 2020. Bowers was also named the Steven Muller Distinguished Professor of the Sciences for AY 22/23 through AY 24/25.
As an educator, Bowers emphasizes the value of and advocates for high impact student-faculty co-learning experiences such as undergraduate research, employs a variety of student-centered techniques in the classroom to suite the needs of individual cohorts, emphasizes connecting content knowledge with real-world applications, and stresses authentic assessment and teamwork/professional skill development inside and outside the classroom. He also devotes energy toward developing and maintaining life-long mentoring relationships with his undergraduate researchers. Bowers is the coauthor of the book Understanding Chemistry through Cars, an original text published by CRC Press in November 2014 that presents fundamental chemical concepts through the context of the automobile, and is the author of a chapter on integrating professional networking into the chemistry curriculum in the summer of 2020. He has several publications on pedagogical innovation and assessment in the Journal of Chemical Education. Bowers keeps abreast of new pedagogy through service on the Chemistry and Biochemistry leadership team in the Council for Undergraduate Research Curriculum Transformation Project at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He also held leadership roles in the Project Kaleidoscope Upstate New York Regional Network in the early 2010s. In addition to his professional academic history, Dr. Bowers has two years of industrial R&D experience in composite wet friction materials and strong interests in the Manhattan Project and automotive chemistry. Bowers has earned multiple teaching awards across his career.
Bowers holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering and a Cooperative Education Certificate from Purdue University (2002) as well as a Ph.D. in Chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University (2006). After receiving his Ph.D., Bowers spent several years as a post-doctoral research associate at the University of Illinois and Michigan State University, as well as one year as a visiting assistant professor of environmental chemistry at Gustavus Adolphus College in southern Minnesota. From there, Bowers became an assistant and then associate professor in the Division of Chemistry at Alfred University. Looking for greater challenges and new opportunities, Bowers moved to St. Mary's College of Maryland (SMCM) in 2016 and is currently an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, which he is chairing from 2023 - 2028. At SMCM, Bowers served on the faculty senate (2017-2023) in three different roles: as a department representative (2017-2019), as the North Division representative (2019-2021), and as the vice president (2021-2023). He is also serving on the Middle States Self Study Steering Committee at SMCM (2023-2025) and co-chairing the standard on Governance, Leadership, and Administration. In the greater scholarly community, Bowers served as an Associate Editor at the journal Clays and Clay Minerals (2021 - 2023) and is currently a Councilor of The Clay Mineral Society (2023-2026). Bowers is also the NCAA Faculty Athletics Representative at St. Mary's College of Maryland, starting in this role fall of 2023. Prior to moving to Maryland, Bowers served as chair of the chemistry division at Alfred University for one year and as a co-chair of the Project Kaleidoscope Upstate New York Regional Network Steering Committee. He also won the first annual St. Mary's College of Maryland Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Chili Cookoff in December, 2019.
Scholarly Specialties and Interests
Smectite clay minerals
Applications of solid-state NMR in geochemistry
Supercritical methane and carbon dioxide adsorption, dynamics, and chemistry at mineral-fluid interfaces
Molecular-level structure, dynamics, and chemistry at mineral-water interfaces
Fluids in porous materials
Fossilization in the Calvert Cliffs
Integrating spectroscopy and molecular modeling
Organo-mineral interactions in the environment
Biomineralization
Thermal and photochemical degradation of pollutants at solid-fluid interfaces
Teaching and Pedagogical Expertise
High impact faculty-student co-learning experiences such as research and research-based undergraduate curricula
Alumni networking in the undergraduate chemistry curriculum
Assessment strategies and assessment-informed pedagogical innovation
Collaboration in undergraduate curricula
Professional skills in chemistry/biochemistry curricula
Physical chemistry
Environmental chemistry
Atoms-first general chemistry
Chemistry and history of the Manhattan Project
Chemistry of cars
Interests and Hobbies
Running
Cars, driving, and automobile racing
Amateur fossil hunting
Collecting rocks and minerals
Sports, particularly hockey and football
Music
Video games
Family road trips into nature - Mountains, beaches, waterfalls, and volcanos in particular
Viking and pirate history and mythology
Growing peppers
Basenjis
Home and car audio/video
