Vicente Augusto Talanquer Artigas (born 1962 in Mexico City) is a Mexican-American chemical education researcher, physical chemist, and university professor. Since 2000, he has been a professor at the University of Arizona. His work in chemical education focuses on learning progressions, students’ conceptions, and “chemical thinking”. He developed the instructional framework Chemical Thinking and documented its implementation in undergraduate general chemistry at the University of Arizona. For his contributions to chemical education, he has received several international awards, including the James Flack Norris Award (2012), the ACS Award for Achievement in Research for the Teaching & Learning of Chemistry (2021), and the Nyholm Prize for Education of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2025).
Early life and education Talanquer’s parents fled Spain to Mexico as children during the Spanish Civil War. After receiving asylum from the Mexican government, the family settled in Mexico. He attended Colegio Madrid in Mexico City. He studied chemistry at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), earning a Bachelor of Science in 1985 and a Master’s degree in 1987. His master’s thesis in physical chemistry, titled “Sublattice ordered phases of the Griffith’s three component model”, was supervised by Carmen Varea. He then worked as a research assistant at UNAM’s Department of Chemistry until 1988. From 1989 to 1992, he pursued doctoral studies in physical chemistry at UNAM under the supervision of Alberto Robledo. His dissertation was titled “Bulk and interfacial properties of reacting and associating systems”. He received a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1992. During his master’s and doctoral studies, he taught physics and chemistry at the secondary school “Instituto Escuela”, which he co-founded. He also taught physics at UNAM as an assistant professor (tenure-track) from 1988 to 1992.
Academic career From 1992 to 2000, Talanquer was an associate professor in UNAM’s Department of Chemistry. For the first three years, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago, under the supervision of David W. Oxtoby. He returned to UNAM in 1995, where he taught and conducted research in physical chemistry. After returning to Mexico, he contributed to the development of national elementary-school science textbooks. From 1996 to 2003, he was a visiting scholar at the James Franck Institute. In 2000, he was appointed associate professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Arizona, where he has worked since. Building on his background in physical chemistry, his focus increasingly shifted toward chemical education research, influenced in part by his work on textbooks and his interest in cognition and learning. He moved his research emphasis to chemical education, particularly to understanding learning difficulties in science and chemistry. In 2013 he was promoted to full professor and in 2015 to distinguished professor. At the University of Arizona’s College of Science, he was from 2000 to 2015 involved in the preparation of future science teachers and teaches courses on science curricula, assessment, and methods of chemistry instruction. Since then, his primary teaching responsibilities have been instructing general chemistry courses for science and engineering majors. Within the research community, Talanquer has served on the Chemistry Education Research (CER) Committee of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Division of Chemical Education (DivCHED). He is also a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Science Education, Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research and Journal of Chemical Education, and series editor to the book series Advances in Chemistry Education Series. He is a co-facilitator of the IUPAC project “Systems Thinking in Chemistry for Sustainability: Toward 2030 and Beyond (STCS 2030+)”. In 2019 he chaired the Gordon Research Conference in Chemistry Education Research and Practice, and he served as chair in 2022 of the ACS DivCHED.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
