News Writing 4

     Growing up, his family was diverse. He has a mentally-challenged older brother, a twin brother, and a younger brother who he says looks like Sylvester Stallone did at 25.

     "I came from a very diverse family,” Dominick Casadonte said, “so I learned how to interact with a lot of different kinds of people."

     Casadonte's family would go out of their way to try to help each other out. They would provide each other with intellectual, moral and ethical stimulation.

     Casadonte said he is the interim dean of the graduate school and a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry at Texas Tech.

     Casadonte had a desire to go into education rather than go into industry after finishing school.

     "I knew that I wanted to go into academics rather than into industry or international lab," Casadonte said. "So I applied to various schools and Texas Tech had the most appropriate, for me, mix of teaching and research and its priorities base."

     Gary Bell, a professor of history at Tech, said Casadonte is one on the best teachers at the university.

     Bell said Casadonte won the Minnie Stevens Piper award for outstanding teaching in Texas. He also won many other awards, such as the outstanding teacher in the honors college and best professor by the president of the university.

     "The man has pretty much done it all," Bell said.

     Casadonte uses different methods to teach his classes. An example is course flipping.

     He said course flipping is when the homework is to watch the lectures that would normally be done in the classroom. The lectures are prerecorded and the students watch the lectures and take notes from them. The students then complete the homework in class.

     According to the Texas Tech Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry website, Casadonte has principal research interests in the chemical effects of high-intensity ultrasound, environmental remediation, nanomaterial fabrication, supramolecular chemistry, design of photoactive metallopolymers, photophysics/photochemistry, and chemical education.

     Casadonte is known as a professor at Tech, but he is also recognized for his humanitarian efforts.

     He said he worked for Habitat for Humanity as an adviser and has done other humanitarian work for the communities he served.

     "I ran a homeless shelter in Urbana-Champaign where I did my post doc for three and a half years," Casadonte said. "It was a Catholic work group shelter, and it was for homeless women and families. The house was donated to us. We routinely had about 20 people living at the house."

     He also said he ran a soup kitchen that fed about 100 people a day with the food provided by several churches while running the homeless shelter.

     When asked about what inspires him, Casadonte said everything.

     "You should always be inspired by your senses, by what you observe, by what you think, by what you hate, by what you love," Casadonte said. "So when I say everything, I truly mean it. Everything is inspirational, if you allow it to be."

     Casadonte was asked to give advice he would give to his students.

     "So you find something that you have a passion for," Casadonte said, "that if you didn't do it, you would feel significant loss in your life - you should explore that as a possibility."

Sidebar:

     A chemistry professor at Texas Tech has many role models he looks up to.

     "When I was a kid Albert Einstein was my role model," said Dominick Casadonte, chemistry professor and interim dean of the graduate school at Tech.

     Casadonte said he is a devout Christian and considers Christ to be one of his role models. He also said his teachers, while he was at the conservatory, to be his role models.

     "My motto's always been, 'try to get involved with people who are better than yourself because that's how you improve,'" Casadonte said. "So, I've always tried to look at people who are in the top of their fields in whatever they're doing."

     He also said the unsung heroes who do random acts of kindness are role models of his and they do not have to be older people.

     Gary Bell, a history professor at Tech, compared Casadonte to Albert Einstein.

     "The reason I make the comparison is because first of all," Bell said, "Einstein had a wide-ranging interest."

     Bell also said Einstein and Casadonte were both interested in a lot of different subjects and both have a good sense of humor.

Author-source page

Author:                                  Jonathan Lin

                                         jonathan.lin@ttu.edu

Sources:                                 Dominick Casadonte

                                         Gary Bell

Research:

http://www.depts.ttu.edu/chemistry/Faculty/casadonte/