Shaping America's Scientific and Technological Workforce: NSF-Sponsored Workshops on Curricular Developments in the Analytical Sciences

Analytical chemistry has changed tremendously in the past decade. No longer is analysis solely the domain of formally trained analytical chemists. Today, scientists from an increasingly broad array of disciplines are using analysis and analytical techniques to solve increasingly varied problems. The current exploration of Mars provides a vivid example of how the discipline has changed: on the Mars project, multidisciplinary teams of geologists, paleobiologists, astronomers, and chemists work together to study heterogeneous samples of limited size using a broad array of recently developed experimental techniques in order to answer questions of fundamental interest to everyone on our planet. These changes and concerns regarding the equipping of America's future technological workforce, raised by the National Science Foundation in its 1996 report Shaping the Future, were the motivation for a series of workshops, funded by the NSF's DUE and Division of Chemistry, held this past year.