Authors

Dr. Shailesh Ambre

Dr. Shailesh Ambre completed his bachelors and master’s in chemistry from India and worked in the pharmaceutical industry as a process chemist building cephalosporin antibiotics. He came to the United States of America and completed his PhD from the University of Georgia, Athens. During his Ph.D., he invented the methodology to build a large library of N-linked glycans found on the surface of viruses like HIV and H1N1.  He expanded his synthetic expertise through a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) building glycopeptides used as therapeutics and vaccine candidates against cancer. Since leaving NIH in 2017, Dr. Ambre has focused on teaching organic chemistry to undergraduates and undergraduate research. He is hoping to distil his experience in industry and academia to create a resource that will greatly benefit the students studying organic chemistry.

Isabel Thomas

Isabel is currently a biochemistry undergraduate student and serves as a Supplemental Instruction Leader in chemistry at Metropolitan State University of Denver. She brings an invaluable perspective through her identity as a student and through her experience as an SI instructor in presenting difficult material in a simplified and accessible manner to improve student comprehension, as well as clarifying common areas of student misunderstanding in organic chemistry. Isabel is working in partnership with Dr. Ambre to write, edit, and draw this work.

Other Contributors

Dr. Emily Ragen

Emily Ragen is an educator with a Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Kansas State University (2008) and a B.A. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California at Berkeley (2002). She has taught chemistry and biochemistry courses at Metropolitan State University of Denver since 2013, developed an OER section of General Chemistry I in 2015, and has been promoting OER adoption, adaption and creation since serving on the state of Colorado OER council in the summer of 2017.

I have experience integrating guided inquiry and course-based undergraduate research experiences and shared my learning journey to OER in a 2019 TedX talk titled Lasting Learning in an Age of Abundant Information. She has also led a variety of faculty-focused OER trainings, including 20 semester-long OER faculty learning communities at MSU Denver that have been supported by OER grants from the state of Colorado. Her goals are high quality educational experiences without financial barriers and to help students understand the molecular world around them.

Sara Satkowiak, MLIS

Sara Satkowiak, MLIS is the Scholarly Research Services Program Lead Librarian at Auraria Library. Sara received her Master’s in Library and Information Science in 2022 from the University of Wisconsin, and a B.A. in History and Political Science in 2012 from the University of Tennessee. Auraria Library supports all three of the institutions of higher education that share the Auraria Campus in downtown Denver (Metropolitan State University of Denver, University of Colorado-Denver, and Community College of Denver). One of the core components of Sara’s library role is to support OER work at all three campuses.

Sara brings extensive OER, Creative Commons, copyright, licensing, fair use, and scholarly communications experience. She also has instructional design and teaching experience, as a large part of her academic librarianship experience is in teaching informational literacy to all levels of higher education audiences. For this Organic Chemistry OER project, she facilitated the role of researcher/librarian (finding how others have approached the challenges of STEM OER creation, looking into possible tools, etc.) and addressing  (without being a lawyer) any licensing, copyright, or fair use concerns that arose in the creation process.