About me

Hi, I'm Beth Haas. I'm an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at Utica University. I enjoy helping others see and learn and understand, and I aspire to be as good a teacher and mentor as those who helped me.

I got into chemistry thanks to an awesome high school chemistry teacher and a course in darkroom photography. Chemistry felt mysterious and magical, and I wanted to know how it all worked. In college I did inorganic synthesis work and learned a fair amount of small molecule crystallography from some pretty fantastic folks. For graudate school at the University of Michigan, I started down the inorganic-synthesis path, but before I knew it, I was hooked on a different kind of science: investigating the dance of membrane-associated DNA-binding protein molecules in Vibrio cholerae cells (the bacteria responsible for cholera). I like research because I love learning new things, and there is still plenty to learn. Also, lasers are awesome.

I spent a year teaching alongside the wonderful folks at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. From there I moved to the tenure track at Misericordia University, teaching introductory chemistry for majors, analytical chem, and seminar courses on professional development topics, and doing a hodgepodge of research: developing experiments for chemistry teaching labs, modeling protein diffusion in confined environments, and dipping a toe into the analytical chemistry pool. Thanks to the pandemic, I never did get a tenure decision. Instead, I moved to Utica. It was hard to pick up and go, but it was such as good decision. These days I teach a lot of introductory chemistry, and some upper-level electives (Chemistry of Cooking and Environmental Chemistry). I'm off the tenure track, so my scholarship happens at a slower pace than before.

All the way from that start in high school, I've been trying to see the unseen: revealing images in developing photos, mapping atomic positions in semiconductor crystals, getting beyond the diffraction limit to watch proteins move, and working out better ways for chemistry learning to happen. Chemistry is still mysterious and wonderful to me.

Outside of the classroom and lab you can find me tending my garden, dabbling in programming, reading romance novels and pop-sci books, sewing, playing video games, baking for friends and co-workers, and taking lots of pictures of my kids. I started this site to give my writing muscles some more exercise, to keep the hand moving, really.

I used to be on Twitter as @belehaa, but I quit posting there in the fall of 2022 and eventually deleted my account. I've switched my social media habits to the fediverse. Find me there as @belehaa@wandering.shop.