Middlecamp has worked locally and nationally to make the chemistry classroom more hospitable for women and students of color. Over the past 20 years, she has designed, supervised and taught a number of programs for students underrepresented in the sciences. From 1979 to 1989, she taught chemistry in the Center for Health Sciences Summer Enrichment Program for minority middle-school youth from Chicago, Milwaukee, suburban Madison, and northern Native American reservations.
Since 1989, she has directed the Chemistry Learning Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which provides tutoring, advising and support for underrepresented students in first- and second-year chemistry courses. And each summer for the past five years, she has served as a mentor and a speaker at the University of Wisconsin System Women in Science Curriculum Reform Institute, hosted at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
At the university, she also teaches a large undergraduate course for non-science majors that applies chemistry to society and deals with “real world” issues. The course is taught from the American Chemical Society’s textbook, Chemistry in Context, which she co-authored.
Her scholarship in applying chemistry to people’s lives led her to explore the connections between uranium and the people of the Southwest. With her Navajo colleague at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Omie Baldwin, she hosted a campus-wide reading group in 2002 entitled
“Uranium and the Navajo People.” The group starts from a real world issue: the mining of uranium on the Navajo Reservation in New Mexico and Arizona. It is a pilot for what they hope will be the first course offered by the chemistry department to meet the campus-wide ethnic studies requirement.
Middlecamp received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1972, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Studying as a Danforth Fellow, she received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1976. She resides with her husband, Ralph Middlecamp, in Madison, Wisc.
The Regional Award for Contributions to Diversity, given to commemorate the ACS Women Chemists Committee’s 75th anniversary celebration, recognizes individuals who have stimulated or fostered diversity in the chemical workplace.