Heidi Hendrickson

Heidi Hendrickson serves as Associate Professor of Chemistry at Lafayette College, where she integrates physical and computational chemistry into both her teaching and research programs. Her scholarly work bridges multiple scientific disciplines while maintaining a strong connection to the liberal arts tradition.

Her research program focuses on five primary directions:

• Information transfer and signaling pathways in proteins
• Reactivity and toxicity mechanisms of environmental pollutants
• Optoelectronic properties of semiconducting polymers
• Pedagogical methods for physical chemistry and programming instruction
• Applications of quantum information science to chemical problems

Professor Hendrickson teaches Physical Chemistry I (covering thermodynamics and kinetics of chemical reactions) and General Chemistry, emphasizing how mathematical models accurately predict real-world chemical phenomena. Her teaching philosophy highlights the power of theoretical equations to explain observable chemical behavior.

She leads a diverse research group comprising students from chemistry, biochemistry, mathematics, physics, computer science, neuroscience, engineering disciplines, and even English. The group emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration with experimentalists at R1 institutions and values humanistic thinking through cultural activities including film screenings, book clubs, museum visits, and theatrical productions like Copenhagen by Michael Frayn, which facilitates discussions about scientific ethics.