This site is the home page for David Brown, Professor of Chemistry at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, California.
It is seemingly continually under construction but earnestly attempts to include information pertinent to the programs and classes at the college, professional information (curriculum vitae), and also personal information about David and his adventures.
Very significant news to report at this site is that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been extremely generous to us at Southwestern College. In 1998 we were awarded a grant from the "Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement" (ILI) program (grant DUE 9850951) to purchase some very nice analytical chemical instrumentation! The ILI program has since evolved into the "Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement" (CCLI) program.
The equipment those funds allowed us to acquire includes an FTIR Spectrometer (with an Attenuated Total Reflectance (ATR) accessory), a GC/MS System, an NMR Spectrometer, a UV/Vis Spectrometer, and an HPLC System. This grant truly revolutionized the capability with which we are able to teach chemistry and undertake research and independent study projects with our students.
In 2001 we received funds from the NSF "Advanced Technological Education" (ATE) program (grant DUE 0101729) to establish a new degree program in Chemical Technology at Southwestern College.
Our efforts in improving the state of the analytical instrumentation in our Chemistry department have been chronicled in the print media. An article, from an issue of the Southwestern Sun newspaper from the Fall Semester 1998 documented some of the research activities in which we were involved (reported in the Nature Biotechnology and Cryobiology papers found below) that employed the use of the FTIR spectrometer.
The Southwestern College Messenger, in its Winter 1999 issue, also covered some of our endeavors with analytical instrumentation.
An article in the February 2000 issue of Nature Biotechnology reports the results from a collaborative project investigating the dessication tolerance of genetically engineered human cells, undertaken together with researchers from the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and Advanced Tissue Sciences of La Jolla, CA. To download a copy of the article in .pdf format, click here.
A follow-up article documenting further work from this collaboration was published in the journal Cryobiology in 2001. That article can be downloaded as well. Please click here to do so.
You'll need to have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer in order to view these .pdf files. Click here to install Acrobat Reader.
The links below are useful for navigating around my cozy little site.
My Own Personal Links Page (includes links for students)
The Joshua Tree Page
The Construction of our new Lab during the Summer of 1999
Spring Break 2005 Information
Photos from past Spring Break trips to Joshua Tree
My Headstand Page