Dr. Charity Flener Lovitt is a lecturer at Seattle U where she focuses on general chemistry and interdisciplinary science courses. She is also active in science outreach and helped plan a successful booth for Seattle University at the inaugural 2012 Seattle Science EXPO. She will serve as an advisor on the 2013 Seattle Science EXPO Task Force. When not teaching, course planning, or grading, Dr. Lovitt stays active in the Seattle U community by participating in workshops for the new CORE curriculum and pilots of the new campus LMS. 

Her research interests are in computational models of organometallic and organic reactions to support and enhance experimental results. Current projects include investigating how copper interacts with Alzheimer’s type proteins and how electrons transfer in organometallic nanowires (collaborating with Prof. Eric Watson of Seattle U).

Her undergraduate and graduate work spanned a diverse range of fields from cold shock domains in trigger factor proteins, synthesis of molecular magnets, methane and hydrogen activation by transition metals, and chemical education. Research has taken her from a small town in Kentucky to studies at universities in Illinois, Georgia and Texas and research in Germany, Slovakia, and Cambodia.  For her PhD, she was lucky enough to work with three fabulous mentors; Prof. Greg Girolami, Prof. Thom Dunning, and Prof. Paul Kelter.

She spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow to Germany with Prof. Gernot Frenking and was a postdoctoral associate with Prof. Wes Borden at the University of North Texas. She then left the hot desert of Texas for the mild temperatures of Seattle. She was an instructor in chemistry at Bellevue College before coming to Seattle University in September 2011.

Dr. Lovitt has published articles in Angewandte Chemie, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Organometallics, and the Journal of Physical Chemistry. Together with Paul Kelter, she edited a book called Chemistry as a Second Language: Chemical Education in a globalized society with ACS books. She often presents at national and international meetings on both computational and chemical education topics.