Holly Walter Kerby
Holly Walter Kerby is an instructor at Madison Area Technical College (MATC), a 2-year college that offers liberal arts courses as well as degree programs in over 100 vocational areas. She teaches chemistry and physics to students in programs ranging from Medical Laboratory Technicians and Dental Hygiene to Machine Tool and Auto Body. She also teaches a nonmajor's chemistry for college transfer students. Before working at MATC, Holly did research at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, supervised UW-Madison student teachers at local secondary schools, and taught chemistry and physics in high school. Before that she was a manager and mass spectrometrist at Hazelton Laboratories, Madison, WI. She holds a B.A. in chemistry from the College of Wooster, and an M.S. in Soil Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Karen Anderson
Karen Anderson was trained as a microbial ecologist. She holds an M.S. in microbiology from Montana State University and a B.S. in biology from the University of Puget Sound. After working as a lab research technician in bacteriology and human oncology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she migrated to Madison Area Technical College (MATC) as a part-time instructor. In both microbiology and general chemistry courses, she taught in much the same way she had been taught: lecture with generalizations of course material. After several years at MATC, she realized that the majority of her 2-year associate degree students didn't relate well with generalizations and needed applied materials to entice them to learn. To better serve her program students (in nursing, veterinary technicians, dental hygiene, respiratory care) she has been working with other chemistry and program faculty to try to integrate more program-pertinent material into the chemistry curriculum. Much of what she has learned has come from the school of hard knocks, feedback from her students, collaboration with other chemistry and program faculty, and attending MATC faculty seminars and talks from chemical education sessions at national meetings of the American Chemical Society.
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