EDITOR'S NOTE: This profile was originally published in the Fall 2024 edition of Surgere Magazine. To see the full publication, click here.

Now in her 22nd year teaching chemistry at Westridge, Dr. Edye Udell remains one of the most enthusiastic teachers you will ever meet. Part of that stems from the joy she feels in inspiring young women in the sciences, but equal to that is helping students understand their personal capabilities of learning in deep and complex ways.

Her passion for advancing women in the sciences started at MIT where women in her freshman class were frequently told by peers that they were only there because they were women. When she started her Ph.D. program at Caltech, Udell decided to get involved in then-nascent programs to support women in science and founded a campus Women in Science Engineering (WISE) program that paired graduate and undergraduate students.

“Teaching science at a girls’ school is very special,” said Udell. “In co-ed schools, girls are still in a significant minority in advanced STEM classes. Here [at Westridge], advanced courses with all girls can really give them the inner confidence and desire to succeed in STEM.”

Udell’s early adoption of flipped learning—in which students watch video lessons at home so that class time is used for collaborative learning and one-on-one support from Udell to solve problems related to the lesson—proved crucial in encouraging girls to take advanced courses. 

"I wish my class were called 'Logical Thinking and Problem Solving Through the Eyes of a Chemist.'"

“Honors and advanced chemistry classes are really hard, so I focus on hard being fun rather than too hard. My goal is to make it as easy as possible while not lowering the level of questions being posed,” said Udell. Flipped learning and the active learning it enables—where students learn through active problem solving and are supported in their individual styles of learning—add a dose of “fun hard” and reduce student frustration from struggling with concepts alone.

The data supports that this method has opened advanced courses to more students. Prior to flipped learning, at most 20% of students would take honors chemistry. This year, that number is at 60%.

“I wish my class were called ‘Logical Thinking and Problem Solving Through the Eyes of a Chemist’,” said Udell. “I teach them how to do logic and how to do really complex problem solving. They learn a heck of a lot of chemistry, but more importantly, they learn how to do five-step logic problems. It’s something all students, whether they go further in the sciences or
not, will use throughout their education and lives.”

Asked for any final thoughts, Udell said: “I love my job and my students. We get to help these young women discover who they want to become, and they are so full of energy and so thirsty to learn.