School of Sciences

Dr. Michael Condren  (home page)

Title: Professor Emeritus of Chemistry.
e-mail:  mcondren@cbu.edu

Courses regularly taught: CHEM 115 and 115L General Chemistry and lab; CHEM 214 and 214L Quantitative Analysis and lab; CHEM 415 and 415L Analytical Chemistry and lab; and CHEM 422 and 422L Inorganic Chemistry and lab.

Length of service at CBU: Dr. Condren taught as a full time faculty member at CBU from 1981 to 2009.

Formal Education: Dr. Condren earned his B.S. in chemistry from the University of Arkansas. His M.S. and Ph.D. were both earned at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Background: He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas and raised across the Arkansas River in Van Buren where he graduated from high school. Before coming to CBU, he was the chemistry department at the College of the Ozarks in Clarksville, Arkansas. It was there that he met his wife, the Rev. Jan Condren. They have two adult children and one grandson, Virginia and 2-year old Shawn Reason of New Orleans, Louisiana and Matt, a senior Electrical and Computer Engineering major.

Professional interests: Dr. Condren’s research interests are in the areas of Inorganic Chemistry and the Chemistry of Materials. He has maintained a long standing collaboration with Dr. David Jeter at Rhodes College and Dr. A. W. Cordes at the University of Arkansas. That research has involved the synthesis and characterization of coordination compounds of copper with coordination number of five. This collaboration has provided several students with senior research projects of determining the structure using single crystal x-ray diffraction.

For the past 14 years, Dr. Condren has been collaborating with the Interdisciplinary Education Group of the Material Research Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work with this group has involved the creation of educational materials for teaching the concepts of modern materials. This association has resulted in many publications and invitations for presentations at scientific meetings throughout the United States. Dr. Condren serves as one of the web masters for this National Science Foundation research group. Dr. Condren’s interest in applications of light emitting diodes has earned him the nickname of “LED man” The picture shows Dr. Condren with a traffic light that uses LED's.

Service:   Dr. Condren has been a member of the American Chemical Society for 43 years. He served as Chair of the Memphis Local Section of ACS in 2004, and has chaired the High School Examinations Committee for the last twelve years. He has served as the Faculty Advisor for the CBU Chapter of Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society (SAACS) for over 20 years. Members of the SAACS help him administer the high school exams to the best chemistry students in the Mid-South. This has led to national awards for CBU's SAACS chapter for the last few years.

Interests:   Besides his interests in chemistry, Dr. Condren is crazy about trains. He was once described in Trains magazine as bowing “to few others on matters Frisco...”. That description resulted from the “Fallin’ Flag” article that he authored for Classic Trains magazine. The Frisco is the former St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad, now part of the BNSF. His photo collection of 49 years is regularly called upon by editors of railroad magazines and books. In recent years he has turned to more historical research of railroads, publishing the results through the web. He is an avid Razorback fan and follows their football and basketball teams. He is also an avid basketball fan of the CBU Buccaneers, attending all home games. In the Spring 2005 semester and 2005-2006 academic year, he served as Faculty Athletic Representative.