By Ben Paul, UCLA Division of Physical Sciences
Twenty years ago, Michelle Moyne was a young UCLA undergraduate, studying chemistry with a dream of one day becoming a pharmacist. On a nearly daily basis, often in tears, she would drop into the office of Denise Mantonya, the since-retired student services advisor. Michelle was struggling with the same challenges many young students face—especially in chemistry and biochemistry. As a young student away from home, she was enrolled in some of the most difficult classes on campus and without much of the institutional support that today’s students enjoy.
At the same time, Denise herself had not come to the department with any background in student services. In fact, prior to UCLA, all her job experience had been in retail and restaurant work. What Denise did have, however, were two skills that proved invaluable: a gift for listening and a joy in seeing young people grow.
“I always treated students with love and compassion. To do that I had to be willing to hear them. Watching them grow into adulthood and find out where they wanted to go was so rewarding,” she said.
Today, Michelle is a successful pharmacy manager. She earned a Ph.D. in chemistry and still stays in close touch with her former student advisor. “Denise played a pivotal role in my undergraduate journey. Her dedication and belief in my potential helped me pass all my classes and inspired me to push toward my goal,” she said.
Since Denise’s retirement and Michelle’s graduation, the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry has come to recognize just how much this mindset impacts student growth. Setting out to build on that momentum, it has made great strides in student education while keeping these values of listening and compassion at the center of its mission.
Dr. Stacie Nakamoto came to the department as a Ph.D. student herself in 1996. Like many students, she found her path was not a straight line. Originally studying political science, she was interning one summer at a law firm when her office-mate came in crying one day; the coworker’s family member had just been diagnosed with leukemia, and Stacie was frustrated that so little could be done.
This feeling, along with the inspiration she had found in a freshman biology class, sent her on the way toward scientific research. By the time she graduated with a doctorate in biochemistry and molecular biology, she hit the ground running as an educator. “What I love most about teaching is that light bulb moment. When you realize you have helped a student understand something totally new and literally see it in their face and body language. This is so rewarding,” she said.
With nearly a quarter century of teaching experience, Stacie has seen a lot of changes: from new technical tools like “clickers” to help her understand class engagement to new pedagogical techniques like “think/pair/share” to increase student engagement. But ultimately what she credits with making the most difference is a focus on community.
“Not a lot of people think about community—especially in the lab,” she says. “But I’ve focused on making our labs little communities in and of themselves.” Stacie’s classes include two four-hour labs a week. The students share a lot of time with each other and with her. As a result, they learn to help each other and learn as a team—even sitting together during graduation every year and staying in touch years after graduation.
When Dr. Johnny Pang began teaching twenty-three years ago, it wasn’t something he knew he would be at for very long. “Teaching is a learning process in and of itself—no one is born knowing how to do it,” he said. “At the beginning of my career I didn’t know how to teach at all. It took time to figure out how to do it and what I wanted to get out of it.”
Today, Johnny is one of the department’s most popular teachers and lab instructors, and he won the Hanson-Dow Faculty Award for Excellence in 2021. Like Stacie, he is dedicated not just to teaching the course materials but to treating the students themselves as unique individuals with different talents. As a young teacher, he took student evaluations very seriously. He would consider both the positive and negative comments students had about him and made a point of listening closely to their concerns. To this day, as an established instructional faculty member in the department, Johnny reads every comment from his students and still takes his evaluations from all his students seriously.
Because he teaches some of the largest classes on campus, sometimes with more than 500 people enrolled, many of his students are not chemistry and biochemistry majors. Making the material he teaches relevant to these students can be especially challenging. According to Johnny, helping students understand the real-world applications and be able to visualize what they are doing is a key aspect of his teaching.
“One especially successful approach we’ve taken is to incorporate computer simulations of molecules. In our lab courses, the goal is not just to teach students how to make something and learn the proper techniques, but to also ensure students appreciate the application and what they are making by visualizing molecules in the molecular world,” he said.
Simply mentioning the words “Chem 14C” and “Chem 14D” can trigger emotions like fear and anger. These two organic chemistry courses have a reputation for being particularly challenging and not a lot of fun—for students and teachers alike. For Professor Hung V. Pham, however, walking into these courses is the highlight of his week. And he has managed to make it a highlight for his students as well.
Hung, who won the department’s Hanson-Dow Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2022, describes himself as a lifelong learner. “I think organic chemistry has a bit of an unfair reputation,” he says. “The challenge with the course is in finding the right way to reach students with the material, not the material itself.” That empathy with students who may be struggling allows him to find creative and unique ways of introducing seemingly difficult concepts to students.
But it wasn’t always this way. When the pandemic hit, Hung had only been teaching for a few years, and suddenly everything was turned on its head. “I almost quit at that point. But then I realized there was an opportunity there. I actually had nothing to lose and became more vocal in advocating for new approaches to teaching,” he said.
It is Hung’s commitment to his students, as individual people, that he credits for his success. Hung stated, “I love talking to students and making a point of being accessible to them and attending student events. By treating them like adults deserving of respect, they realize it’s up to them if they want to learn the material or not.”
While it’s true what Johnny Pang says, that no one is born into teaching, you can be raised with it. For Professor Neil Garg, his teaching journey began much earlier than most people’s—as a sophomore at NYU where he led freshmen clinics. Unfortunately, that journey was mostly put on hold through much of his graduate and post-graduate career.
When he was finally re-introduced to undergraduate teaching more seriously at UCLA, it was to teach one of the least popular classes. Chem 14D is a 400-person undergraduate course filled mostly with non-chemistry majors who are hoping to pursue a career in a medical profession. But Neil soon realized the amazing opportunity he had.
“In a large class, the beauty is getting 400 students excited about chemistry,” he said. “Chem 14D used to have a reputation as a weed-out class. I realized I had a chance to change people’s minds and reintroduce them to a subject from a new perspective.”
Now, Neil focuses much of that mind-changing energy on the teaching of organic chemistry. The subject is challenging for a lot of students: it’s different from the general chemistry most students learn in high school, and it has a higher problem-solving component without the mathematics people usually associate with chemistry. For young students, learning organic chemistry can be a bit like trying to learn to write without knowing the alphabet.
Understanding that challenge, Neil set out to teach the language of organic chemistry to students at an earlier age. He works directly with current undergraduate and graduate students to develop free educational resources for pre-college students and the general public. They have also worked together to develop free, downloadable games for young students that teach the concepts of organic chemistry, and they have even established the UCLA Chem Kids summer camp to bring young students to campus to get a head start on these concepts.
All of this was possible because Neil, like everyone else highlighted here, listens to students. “I could not have succeeded in Chem 14D if I hadn’t been open to student concerns about their education and experience taking science classes. And I could never have developed these educational tools without the students and their creativity,” he said. In 2018, Garg was awarded one of the country’s top teaching honors, Baylor University’s prestigious $250,000 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching.
And if you’re going to be serious about listening to students, it’s important to make sure you’re listening to all of them. Even before the pandemic, Professor Al Courey noticed they had a persistence problem. Students, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, were not sticking with the sciences.
What was happening turned out to be a common phenomenon at universities across the country: passionate students excited about science would show up on campus, but because they had not been given access to the preparation and support that some of their peers had, they would eventually give up and pursue a different path. For Al, the Division of Physical Sciences’ Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence, this was tragic. “I, and all my fellow faculty in the department, have a great love and respect for chemistry. So you can imagine my frustration with the fact that chemistry, specifically, is seen as a big contributor to low persistence among new students in the sciences,” he said.
Traditionally, universities address this problem by offering incoming students more remedial courses to get them up to speed. But the evidence shows that this is actually counterproductive: it makes students want to leave the sciences even more.
Instead, Al helped implement something much more aspirational. “We developed a series of general chemistry courses that run in parallel to our other classes—with the same learning objectives, rigor, and expectations,” he said. The difference is that these courses, Chem 14AE and 14BE, provide extra support to the students in the classroom. They are learning the same material and seeing that they are cared about just as much as anyone else in the department.
These courses include extra discussion time with an emphasis on collaborative learning. According to Al, giving these students a stronger sense of community and the opportunity to work together plays a major role in increasing persistence in chemistry.
This conclusion is borne out by a study published in the Journal of Chemical Education. This study presents evidence that these courses increase students’ persistence in the sciences while building their sense of belonging in chemistry. For Al, like any good teacher, that is the best win one could ask for.
But perhaps no one has a better perspective on how education in the department has evolved over the years than Professor Mike Jung. Now in his 51st year at UCLA, Mike doesn’t have much to say about new teaching techniques or fancy technology. What he does have is a lifetime of knowledge about what it takes to teach—and a whole lot of chemistry chops.
“Learning is difficult, it’s hard. Anyone that tells you it’s easy is full of it. But it can be a fun thing,” he said. “If you can get people excited about chemistry, you can teach chemistry!”
Mike also has a strong appreciation for the power of human connection. Knowing that nothing motivates students more than knowing their teacher sees them and cares for them, he made a point of learning all the students’ names even in his 200-person classes. “In these big classes, students can feel like just a number. I always wanted to make them feel like more than a number,” he said.
Having seen the growth in the department over such a long period of time, Mike is an outspoken cheerleader for the Chemistry & Biochemistry Department. He is quick to point out that the department has no less than five winners of UCLA’s Gold Shield Award, the annual prize given out to only one faculty member for accomplishments in teaching. In fact, Mike himself was the inaugural winner of the award in 1986.
“This department has grown so strong in teaching for two simple reasons,” Mike said. “First, we prioritize it—we consider our students and their education in everything we do. Second, we seek out educators who aren’t just passionate and brilliant, but also great listeners dedicated to students as people.”
But Mike is just as much a cheerleader for the field of chemistry in general. “I have always been a positive person who focuses on the good around me,” he said. “I believe chemistry has an unmatched ability to bring about good in the world. And having the opportunity to help new generations of students see that is a blessing.”
With all his years of experience behind him, Mike had a quick and short answer for what he plans to do after his upcoming retirement.
“I plan to stay right here,” he said without hesitation.
This article originally appeared in the 2025 UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry Departmental Magazine.
