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Persons excluded due to ethnicity or race (PEERs) leave STEM at disproportionate rates; therefore, efforts to engage undergraduate PEERs are critical to creating a diverse STEM workforce. Through a Howard Hughes Medical Institute funded Inclusive Excellence grant (HHMI-IE), the REALISE (REALizing Inclusive Science Excellence) program was developed with the goal to increase student retention and success. As part of this project, an extensive faculty development program, including a backward course design module, workshops on microaggressions and implicit bias, and teamwork training, was created to help faculty implement inclusive pedagogy strategies. There were 33 faculty members who participated in the trainings within faculty learning communities (FLCs) and were further supported with STEM-Education (STEM-Ed) reading groups, faculty mixers, minigrants, and engagement from the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL). Evaluation of 10 faculty members' change narratives and reflective prompts revealed that low-stakes opportunities such as STEM-Ed reading groups had the most influence for instituting learner-centered classroom practices, and the workshops on microaggressions and implicit biases prompted faculty to create opportunities to build respectful relationships with students. Here, we share lessons learned from our program evaluation so that others can successfully implement inclusive pedagogy in chemistry.

Fullerenes and their structure and stability have been a major topic of discussion and research since their discovery nearly 30 years ago. The isolated pentagon rule (IPR) has long served as a guideline for predicting the most stable fullerene cages. More recently, endohedral metallofullerenes have been discovered that violate the IPR. This article presents a systematic, temperature dependent, statistical thermodynamic study of the 24 possible IPR isomers of C84 as well as two of the experimentally known non-IPR isomers (51365 and 51383), at several different charges (0, −2, −4, and −6). From the results of this study, we conclude that the Hückel rule is a valid simpler explanation for the stability of fused pentagons in endohedral metallofullerenes. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]