“Teaching STEM with Biomimicry” was the theme of the 2015 CASE Conference held on campus. The half-day event included speakers, plenary sessions, and workshops, all dealing with nature’s role in STEM education and research.
STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math, and the conference brought together from across the region educators and scientists representing each discipline.
Green chemistry was one of the primary topics at the event, and keynote speaker John Warner discussed this at length during his address. He was introduced by Dr. Edward Brush, professor of chemistry at BSU and GreenLab Faculty Coordinator, as well as a longtime proponent of green chemistry.
Dr. Warner , who is president and chief technology officer of Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry, began his address by mentioning that his daughter attends BSU. However, he added, the connection is even deeper than that: The university was the first to sign up with the company’s Green Chemistry Committee, which will train Bridgewater faculty.
“Not changing is the end of everything,” Dr. Warner said, referring to the necessity to move away from the use of harmful chemicals.
The field of green chemistry was created with two questions in mind, said Dr. Warner, “Why would chemist make a hazardous chemical? And how do we train chemists?”
The seeds for such questions date to Mr. Warner’s days as a music major at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he discovered a love for science after he one day tagged along with a friend to one of the school’s labs. Later, working in the field, he put it all together.
“All of a sudden an epiphany happened when I discovered what chemistry truly was,” said Dr. Warner. He’d discovered for himself that chemists were artists too. “Chemists created things. Chemists made things. Chemists used imagination. All my life I was told because I was marginally good at music there were two types of people, artists and scientists. There is actually commonality between the two,” he said.
Dr. Warner said the STEM conference was important because it represented a way to change the world and to help pave the way for a brighter, cleaner, and safer future.
“Why doesn’t every eighth-grade student say, “I want to be a chemist and save the world?”
Speaking earlier in the day were Peter Lawrence, president and cofounder of Biomimicry New England Inc.; and Sam Stier, founding director of the Center for Learning with Nature. (Story and photo by Caitlin Seddon, University News)
