Roy Tasker

Roy Tasker is currently a Professor of Chemistry at Purdue University. He teaches freshman chemistry and graduate courses in chemistry education, and his research interests are in how and what students learn through visualization of the molecular world underpinning observable phenomena (see VisualizingChemistry.com).

In the year before his move to Purdue in August 2015 he presented national workshops on evidence-informed visualisation in tertiary science education at eight universities in Australia as part of his Australian National Senior Teaching Fellowship.

In 2011 he received The Prime Minister’s Award for Australian University Teacher of the Year.

 Research, Development and Consultancy

In the mid-90s he produced a suite of molecular-level animations in his collaborative VisChem project (VisChem.com.au), and these have been adopted by educators and textbook authors internationally. The VisChem Learning Design was then developed as a best-practice, constructivist strategy for using these animations to assist students to build their own mental models of the molecular world, and understand chemistry in a deeper way. 

He is a consultant for universities in Australia and Singapore interested in moving away from passive delivery of information in face-to-face contexts, to interactive, evidence-based teaching. This involves developing learning designs, informed by an evidence-based cognitive model for how we learn, and mediated using wireless student response technology for data mining analytics, and to monitor learning gains and affective factors.

Academic and Professional Background

After Roy graduated from the University of Queensland in 1978 with a BSc(Hons) degree and a DipEd he moved to New Zealand where he obtained his PhD in synthetic inorganic chemistry at the University of Otago in 1982. Following postdoctoral positions at the University of Tasmania and the University of Adelaide, he was appointed as a Foundation Lecturer at the University of Western Sydney in 1985, and finally resigned as the Provost of the Hawkesbury Campus and Professor of Chemistry Education in 2015.