Welcome to the website of Joseph S. Ward III. I received my BS in Chemistry in 1996 from Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan. After leaving LTU I started graduate studies in Organic Chemistry at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation in August, 2002. Shortly (4 days!) after defending I began my current appointment as an assistant professor (one year appointment) at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois where I teach Organic Chemistry for bio/chemistry and related science majors.

As a new faculty member my teaching experience is currently limited and every course is a new challenge and adventure. During my graduate studies at Michigan State I taught advanced Organic Laboratories for primarily chemistry majors. During my last summer at Michigan State I had the opportunity to teach an accelerated summer organic chemistry course for non-majors (10-15 students, 6 week course). It was a positive experience for both myself and the students in the class. Shifting from the large research institution to the primarily undergraduate institution of Rockford College has allowed me the opportunity to have a small class size (10-15) which allows for much more interaction than in a large lecture course such as those offered at MSU.

The orgins of this website project stem from conversations and ideas shared with my friend and colleague Dr. Scott N. Goldie, whom I met during my graduate studies as MSU. I encourage you to visit his website at www.ScottGoldie.com. I created this website with three main goals or purposes in mind. First, this website serves as a living document of my past, present, and proposed work in both teaching and research. To this end I have posted copies of my current curriculum vitae and my teaching philosophy statement. Obviously these documents are by no means static and are updated as needed. Current statements of my research interests are available upon request.

The second aspect of this website is for teaching purposes. I use this website to distribute copies of assignments, answer-keys, and various other handouts via pdf files. This allows my students to download copies of assignments they may have misplaced at any time from any Internet connected computer. I also use this website to collect information from students. Currently this consists of online submission of their study habits on a weekly basis. But I further plan to expand this to include online quizzes, homework assignments, and portions of their laboratory experience. While some institutions have application packages such as WebCT or Blackboard, it has not become commonplace yet. Furthermore, with the increasing array of such software packages out there it may be possible the package choosen by an instition is not compatible with the content and teaching style a professor or cirriculum requires. Given this fact the ability to "do it yourself", while time consuming, becomes appealing.

The third reason is to learn and maintain the skills required to publish content online. I use primarly Omnipage, which is basically an enhanced version of notepad, to write code. I prefer to "hand code" my websites as opposed to using FrontPage or dreamweaver, as it allows me to maintain a level of control over standards compliance. That said this website is designed to work primarily with Mozilla based web browsers (including Netscape 6 and above) and Internet Explorer 5 and above at 1024x768 resolution or higher. Graphics work for this website was done using Photoshop 6.0/7.0. Also portions of this site are coded using PHP server side scripting language. Any suggestions/corrections can be directed .