Publications and Presentations

The presentation highlights the Frick Environmental Center in Pittsburgh as a model of sustainable design and a “living building” that generates renewable energy, manages water responsibly, and serves as a hub for environmental education. It explains how the center can be used as a real-world teaching resource, especially through its live sustainability dashboard, to connect classroom learning with authentic environmental data.

A major focus of the presentation is how the Frick Environmental Center supports experiential learning in science, mathematics, engineering, and environmental studies. The author argues that students are more engaged when lessons connect to real-world issues, and the center’s dashboard makes it possible to build lessons around energy use, weather, water collection, and sustainability.

The presentation also describes an instructional activity for high school students in an exploratory science course. Students analyze the center’s living building features, interpret live data, and respond to reflection questions tied to academic standards such as NGSS and Pennsylvania environmental education standards.

Overall, the presentation positions the Frick Environmental Center as both an environmental achievement and an innovative educational tool that helps students think critically about sustainability, energy conservation, and responsible citizenship.

An article in the Journal of Forensic Science Education by Donald C. Zapien and Russell F. Carley showcases an undergraduate forensic chemistry experiment that guides students through the full process of identifying cotinine, a biomarker of nicotine exposure, in simulated urine using both presumptive and confirmatory techniques. Working over two lab periods, students first employ a competitive ELISA in 96‑well plates to rapidly screen samples, learning to apply statistical decision thresholds and to appreciate ELISA’s strengths and limitations as a high‑throughput presumptive test. Positive samples then undergo liquid–liquid extraction, preparative TLC cleanup, and GC‑MS analysis, where students interpret chromatograms and mass spectra, connect sample cleanliness to spectral library match scores, and see how GC‑MS provides definitive confirmation of cotinine. The authors report that most participants could clearly distinguish between presumptive and confirmatory methods by the end of the activity, making this experiment a robust model for integrating authentic forensic workflows, quantitative reasoning, and instrumental analysis skills into introductory laboratory courses.