Wesley College is a private, primarily undergraduate minority-serving institution located in the historic district of Dover, Delaware (DE). The College recently revised its baccalaureate biological chemistry program requirements to include a one-semester Physical Chemistry for the Life Sciences course and project-based experiential learning courses using instrumentation, datacollection, data-storage, statistical-modeling analysis, visualization, and computational techniques. In this revised curriculum, students begin with a traditional set of biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics major core-requirements, a geographic information systems (GIS) course, a choice of an instrumental analysis course or a statistical analysis systems (SAS) programming course, and then, students can add major-electives that further add depth and value to their future postgraduate specialty areas. Open-sourced georeferenced census, health and health disparity data were coupled with GIS and SAS tools, in a public health surveillance system project, based on US county zip-codes, to develop use-cases for chronic adult obesity where income, poverty status, health insurance coverage, education, and age were categorical variables. Across the 48 contiguous states, obesity rates are found to be directly proportional to high poverty and inversely proportional to median income and educational achievement. For the State of Delaware, age and educational attainment were found to be limiting obesity risk-factors in its adult population. Furthermore, the 2004-2010 obesity trends showed that for two of the less densely populated Delaware counties; Sussex and Kent, the rates of adult obesity were found to be progressing at much higher proportions when compared to the national average.

The solvolysis of 4,5-dimethoxy-2-nitrobenzyl chloroformate (NVOC-Cl, 1) is followed at 25.0°C in twenty hydroxylic solvents. A comparison with previously published rates for benzyl chloroformate and p-nitrobenzyl chloroformate indicates that the inductive effect of the nitro and the two methoxy groups strongly influences the rate of reaction. For 1, the specific rates of solvolysis are correlated using an extended Grunwald-Winstein (G-W) treatment. A direct comparison with the data for phenyl chloroformate (PhOCOCl) in identical solvents strongly suggests that the addition step within an addition-elimination mechanism is rate-determining for both substrates. A reevaluation of the kinetic data for 9-fluorenylmethyl chloroformate (FMOC-Cl, 2) involves a correlation of log⁡(k/k o)2 versus log⁡(k/k o)PhOCOCl. In this plot, deviations were observed in solvents rich in a hydrogen-bonding fluoroalcohol component. Omitting the aqueous fluoroalcohol rate measurements for 2 in an analysis using the extended G-W equation suggested the occurrence of dual pathways differing in the dependences upon the ionizing power and nucleophilicity of the solvent. In addition, the fluorenyl ring is rotated out of the plane containing the ether oxygen and, as a result, PhOCOCl is found to solvolyze 20 times faster than 2 in ethanol and methanol.