 Professor and department head Ed Nater has always worked with his hands. For seven years after his college graduation Nater built homes as a carpenter. Then, as an educator he started building again, this time online.
In 1998 Nater teamed up with University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Phillip Barak to create the Virtual Museum of Minerals and Molecules. The Web site displays hundreds of three-dimensional and interactive images that help students learn about chemical structures.
“Some students can visualize from a description, some can from two-dimensional drawings and some can't visualize it at all,” Nater says.
That's where the museum comes in, Nater says, using technology to teach an often abstract subject. It's proved to be a useful tool for academia and beyond, attracting 250,000 visits each year. An art teacher from inner-city Los Angeles even used the site to teach her students about symmetry.
The Virtual Museum's value and versatility did not go unnoticed as it received recognition and awards from the teaching and scientific communities. The editors of Scientific American Magazine recognized the site with a 2003 Sci-Tech Web Award saying:
“In addition to the impressive images, which allow you to highlight specific atoms and compare a structure to its real-world crystallographic data, there's plenty of old-fashioned information, from how minerals got their names to how likely you are to come across them.”
But the Virtual Museum is just one project for Nater, a researcher and instructor who has focused his energies in a diverse range of topics.
“A lot of people go through their careers by taking one area and doing nothing else,” he says. “I've wandered all over the place, but I enjoy it. I do what's interesting to me.”
Nater studied chemistry and botany as an undergraduate at Western Illinois University and finished up his masters in natural resources at the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Several years later he completed his Ph.D. in soil science at the University of California – Davis.
Since then, Nater has studied everything from landscape evolution to mercury.
Nater's interest in mercury led him to create the Environmental Mercury Research Program, which looks at mercury levels in soils, bogs, forests and other terrestrial areas. For one project, Nater and former professor Dave Grigal assessed the amount of mercury released into the environment from burning wood and other wood by-products.
Nater added another role in 2001 when he was named department head. He again faced a new set of challenges, something almost routine to the 17-year faculty member.
“One of the beauties of academia is that you can reinvent yourself every few years,” says Nater, who enjoys fishing, canoeing and backpacking in his free time.
Being able to vary his balance of teaching, research and administrative duties fit Nater's broad range of interests and ambitions.
“Now, I try to clear roadblocks and find ways to help out,” he says. “The faculty here is a very dynamic, hard working and very well-respected faculty. They're involved in a lot of things and I'm always amazed at how much people are accomplishing.”
Still, Nater is a teacher at heart who enjoys seeing his students excel after graduation.
“Every once in a while you run into a student where you do something to help them out and you find out later you had a big impact,” Nater says. “I had one student who was in a program he didn't like very much. We got him working as an undergrad in the lab doing environmental science work. His G.P.A went from 2.0 to 3.8 for his last two years.”
That student went on to complete his masters and is now a successful professional in his field, says Nater, quick to dismiss credit for the turnaround.
“I feel really good about him because he's doing really good stuff and he's enjoying himself,” he says. “You just have to get him on track and say ‘you can do it.'” |
Return to: The College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences : U of M Home
