IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Dr. Diana Delach: Young Faculty Teaching Award Making Sure Students Get the Skills They Need By Jeff Lagrone
In the view of Lander Assistant Professor of Environmental Chemistry Dr. Diana Delach, teaching works best when it seems most relevant. “I think if you can tap into what students already know and are already interested in, and link your material to that however tangentially you’ve got to do it, that gives everybody a reason to show up,” said Delach, winner of this year’s Young Faculty Teaching Award. If Delach is teaching environmental chemistry and there’s an issue in the news – like the Flint, Michigan, water crisis – “that immediately gets stuck into the course and we can talk through the whole thing. It gives the students a better reason to be in there,” she said. Delach, who has a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology, is no stranger to water problems. For her dissertation at Clemson, she investigated the role played by spiders in transporting and transforming polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in Twelve Mile Creek and Lake Hartwell, where fish remain unsafe to eat because of discharges long ago by the Sangamo Weston plant, near Pickens. The spiders build horizontal webs over the water so they can catch insects emerging from the sediment at the bottom of the lake. When they consume the insects, they ingest PCBs from the sediment, too. The spiders are then eaten by higher-order animals, like
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birds, frogs and lizards, spreading the contamination farther afield. Delach and her students are currently trying to identify both the metals and organic compounds in the sediment in Lake Greenwood. “Once we know what’s there, then we can start saying, ‘OK, where is this coming from, where is it moving to, is it impacting any particular biota, be it fish or crayfish or insects?’” Delach said that she and Associate Professor of Environmental Geology Dr. Dan Pardieck are trying to incorporate more risk assessment of that kind into the Environmental Science program at Lander. They and their colleagues are also working to “make sure the students are getting the skills they need, and not just jumping through the hoops required for graduation.” One such skill is knowing how to “explain their science” so people understand what they’re saying. She has developed a series of scientific communications courses and is teaching one of them for the first time this semester. Delach serves as chair of Lander’s Secondary Education Certification Committee and submitted the proposal to the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education for the development of a new chemistry education major, which has since been approved. Delach enjoys the close relationship she has with her students at Lander and the feedback she gets from them. “They will let you know what’s working for them and what’s not working for them, which is great. I don’t think you get that at large institutions,” she said.