Dr. Gardner grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania. He has a Bachelor’s degree and a Masters degree in Aerospace Engineering from Penn State University, and a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Kent State University. He enjoys reading science fiction and urban fantasy books, going to the movies, and solving diagramless and crostic puzzles. Gardner teaches mostly principles of chemistry for science majors, as well as physical chemistry. His research interests in science focus on applying computational chemistry to topics in climate science. He is currently developing two specific projects. The first one is how ions in the seawater affect the hydration of carbon dioxide. This is connected to the large issue of ocean acidification. The second project is how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might affect the hydrogen-bonding in complexes of atmospherically-important acids. This is connected to the larger issue of acid rain. The College has a program called “Gaussian 16,” which is research-level software that is capable of carrying out ab initio and semi-empirical calculations on a wide variety of systems.