Just like traditional on-campus classes, Penn LPS Online courses emphasize communication and connection with instructors as well as peers. Our courses are designed and delivered by Penn faculty who bring years of teaching experience as well as professional expertise to the classroom. The Faculty Spotlight series aims to introduce you to some of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Meet Simon Tong
Simon Tong is a lecturer and advisor for Penn Pre-Health Programs, where he mentors students who are preparing for health professional school. He earned both a BS in pharmacology and a PhD in chemistry from Stony Brook University. His PhD research involved designing and synthesizing anti-tubercular agents and anti-nociceptive agents as potential drugs to treat tuberculosis and manage pain.
In 2026, Dr. Tong was awarded the Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs. For Penn LPS Online, he developed a course titled PHYL 2100: Fundamental Chemical Principles, which is intended as a continuation of PHYL 1600: Foundations of Physical and Chemical Sciences.
Congratulations on your teaching award! How does it feel to receive this recognition?
It makes me think that what I'm doing is maybe on the right track—that students on average are enjoying the content. That's my ulterior motive: to get students to fall in love with organic chemistry.
What's there to love about organic chemistry?
For me, personally, one of the coolest things that I saw in high school was how drug molecules worked. They can bind to an enzyme with an induced fit where it's almost like a handshake. I thought that was the coolest concept, and I thought I wanted to be a biologist because those are the people studying drug compounds. Then I got to organic chemistry, and I saw that these are the people that make the drug compounds. It's just fascinating to me that we can start with one small building block and turn it into a much bigger molecule, and from there we can use it to inhibit an enzyme on a bacteria to prevent disease, or bind it to a protein to help with pain management. That ended up being two of the things I did in grad school: I worked on a tuberculosis antibiotic and also on a pain management medication.
What led you from working with drug compounds to teaching college courses?
What really first started me down the teaching path was taking organic chemistry myself and really enjoying the way it was taught. There was a little bit of lecturing, a little problem solving, and a recitation component that allowed us to work in groups and got us confident about the material. Then I applied to be a teaching assistant, and started spending time helping my peers in the chemistry learning center on my undergraduate campus, and I really enjoyed interacting with students.
Currently I teach Organic Chemistry 1 and 2 along with their labs. Outside of my teaching roles, I advise Pre-Health students on how to complete our program, when to take the MCAT, and how to apply to health professional school.
What are your Pre-Health students like?
I have a mixture of Core Studies students and Specialized Studies students, and then I have undergraduate students as well. I love working with the population that I have in this class because it's such a big range of people in different places in their academic careers. I have students who are just fresh out of college and students who are coming back after a few years of working. I have students who are my age and changing their careers. I think it's really interesting to interact with people from different walks of life. They're a little bit different in terms of how they approach the material; for example, I find that the post-baccalaureate students typically study more on their own, and they ask for help when they need it.
What's your approach to teaching organic chemistry?
I have a flipped classroom format where students watch prerecorded lecture content ahead of time. I do a recap at the very beginning, and then from there, we move on to problem solving. During that time, what I really love is that I get to interact with the students. I'm walking through the room, answering their questions, seeing who needs help—as opposed to me just speaking to them in the front of the room. They can watch the lecture videos as many times as they want, and then my time with them is reserved for what they don't understand or need to focus on.
How would your approach change for PHYL 2100: Fundamental Chemical Principles, which is fully online?
PHYL 2100 is meant to go in a series with PHYL 1600. I actually helped make a few videos for PHYL 1600, which is more of a survey science class, and we thought we may need more advanced classes to fill out the roster. So I thought I could make a general/organic chemistry course—almost a boot camp—and then pick and choose the topics to go into depth, almost to the level that I would go into for my postbaccalaureate class. That way, PHYL students will get a little taste of organic and general chemistry.
I worked very intimately with the online learning team. I recorded videos to introduce each segment of the course. I made slides—and I enjoy drawing on slides for my courses, so we went back and forth on the best way to show this so that students wouldn't get confused. I also like to show students molecular models so they can get an idea of how a molecule would act or react in a real-life setting. So, in one of the videos, we had a molecular model set up to kind of float in mid-air, and we would rotate it while I did a voiceover. I am kind of excited to see how students view that and how it will help them with the accompanying assignment, where they might have to look at a molecule and think about how it is moving.
What advice do you have for students who are taking your chemistry courses?
Consistency is key. If you work on something every day, just to kind of chip away at it, you'll have a better understanding of it. If you visualize how much work you're putting into a course, what does the graph look like in terms of effort? Typically, it looks like an exponential curve, where you do exponentially more work the closer you are to the exam. I ask students to take all that time that they would spend on the course, and then balance it to make the graph look like a flat line. If you're consistently working, then you're putting the content into your long-term memory as opposed to short-term memory.
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