Dr. W. Stephen McNeil is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at UBC Okanagan, in Kelowna, British Columbia. Information regarding Dr. McNeil's research interests and publications may be found on his faculty research page.

Dr. McNeil often teaches courses such as CHEM 121/123 (Atomic & Molecular and Physical & Organic chemistries), CHEM 220 (Atomic Structure and Molecular Bonding) and CHEM 335 (Bioinorganic Chemistry). If you're planning on taking one of those courses, then you might be here looking for a web page relating to them. In Term 1 of the 2024/25 academic year, he is teaching CHEM 121 and CHEM 220, and in Term 2, he is teaching CHEM 335. All course documents and information for these courses are available through Canvas.

Need some help with chemistry? Visit the Chemistry Course Union in Sci 233B, attend a Supplemental Learning session, or go to the Student Learning Hub in LIB 237 for drop-in tutoring.

If you're a chemistry or biochemistry student, you need a program to draw proper chemical structures. These programs also include some rudimentary name-to-structure and structure-to-name conversion.
• ChemDrawJS is a free-to-use Javascript version of ChemDraw. It's pretty great.
• ChemAxon Marvin is a free Java-based program that runs on PC, Mac, or Linux, and as a browser-based version..
• Both ACDLab's Chemsketch and Dassault Systèms' BIOVIA Draw are PC programs that are free for academic and personal use.

Lots of online tools will help you with naming organic compounds.
• ChemSpider will quickly let you find the structure and name of compounds based on a molecular formula. (The 3D tools omit H atoms, though, so don't trust them.)
• Openmolecules name2structure tool quicky generates a molecular structure from a compound name.

Need a periodic table? Of course you do. Your choice:
• A practical table with element names and molar masses, in either black and white or colour.
• Other attractive colour tables, at PubChem and ptable.com.
• Google's periodic table shows you pretty animated and interactive 3D images of Bohr models of atoms, which means that they bear basically zero resemblence to any properties of real atomic systems.
• Or, if none of those strikes your fancy, try one of these.

Looking for reference data for that lab write-up? Try these sites:
• Webelements and PTable have more data on the elements than you could ever hope to use.
• The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
• The PubChem offers basic physical properties and bioloigcal / pharmacological activity information on small molecules.
• The NIST Chemistry WebBook, including thermochemical and spectroscopic data
• The NIST Computational Chemistry Comparison and Benchmark Database has experimental physical data on over 1500 compounds, such as bond lengths and angles, vibrational frequencies, formation enthalpies, and dipole moments.
• Dictionary of Organic Compounds and Properties of Organic Compounds
• The Spectral Database for Organic Compounds (SDBS)
• Nakamoto's Infrared and Raman Spectra of Inorganic and Coordination Compounds:
    • Part A is theory and main group compounds
    • Part B is coordination compounds, organometallics, and bioinorganic.
• Links to online safety data sheets at Chemical Safety Software.
• Sigma-Aldrich can tell you the expected melting point, boiling point, flash point, and often the IR and NMR spectra of all your reagents and hoped-for products in your organic lab, and, if you screwed up the prep, they'll sell them to you. They also have the safety data sheets on everything they sell.
• Do you have mysterious extra peaks in your NMR spectrum? You need this Organometallics paper and this J. Org. Chem. paper to figure out what they are. There, aren't those the most useful references ever?
• And of course, you need to know how to format your citations in American Chemical Society style.

Think those latex gloves protect your hands from the solvents you're handling? Yeah, not so much.

There are many databases of Jmol molecules to look at, including those at:
• ChemTube3D, featuring models of hundreds of inorganic compounds. However, anaylze these structures critically before using them. Many models are based on qualitative idealized structures rather than experimental data (e.g. the bond angle in NF₃ is not 109.5°), and many are simply wrong (e.g. [I₅]⁺ isn't a W, Cl₂O₆ does not have equivalent Cl atoms, TeO₄ doesn't exist, [NO₂]^– and N₂O₄ do not have unequal N-O bond lengths, [Ni(CN)₄]^2– is not tetrahedral, etc.).

The Royal Society is dedicated to furthering informed communication between media and the scientific community, and is an excellent source of reliable scientific discussion about matters of current importance. Want to know what scientists really think about genetically-modified foods, global warming, or human cloning, and why?

You need to know How Stuff Works.

Dr. McNeil comes to UBC's Okanagan campus by way of the other University of British Columbia campus, the University of Washington, and Douglas College, whereby he has acquired an inordinate fondness for organometallic reaction mechanisms, well-crafted Americanos, and active-learning teaching methods. He is a member of the Chemical Institute of Canada Chemistry Education Division, the American Chemical Society, the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and Project Steve.

His ongoing interests include hiking the Okanagan's many scenic trails, the development and assessment of innovative active-learning and student-engagement strategies, the challenges associated with the learning of advanced chemical bonding models, science communication and chemistry outreach, and esoteric and expensive board games. He is the winner of the 2009 UBC Okanagan Award for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, the 2018 Canadian Society for Chemistry Faculty Advisor Award, the 2018 UBC Okanagan Killam Teaching Prize, the 2019 Chemical Institute of Canada Award for Chemistry Education, and the 2023 BC Teaching and Learning Council West Coast Teaching Excellence Award. So. What's next?

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