Dr. Natacha Souto-Melgar is a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Ralph E. Martin Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Arkansas (U of A). She received her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering and B.S. in Chemistry, both from the University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez.
She has over five years of experience teaching chemical engineering and chemistry courses such as material and energy balances, unit operation laboratories, general chemistry, and organic chemistry laboratories. She also has experience designing and conducting STEM outreach activities to middle and high-school students as well as teacher training workshops. Her teaching interests include using active learning strategies in the classroom and mentoring students in lab courses where they design experiments instead of performing pre-defined laboratory experiments.
At the U of A, she served as the AIChE student chapter advisor. Under her guidance, the student chapter participated for the first time in the ChemE Car competition at the AIChE Mid-America Student Regional Conference, where they won a prize in the poster competition.
She also has experience in the pharmaceutical industry, having worked at Pfizer. There she was involved in process validation, cleaning validation, manufacturing investigations, and improving manufacturing operations using Lean Six Sigma techniques.