Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty

Davita Camp, Ph.D., began her teaching career at Spelman in spring 2018 teaching organic chemistry lectures and labs. Prior to this, she finished a teaching NIH-IRACDA postdoctoral fellowship at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX. The REACH fellowship afforded her the opportunity to work alongside influential scientists studying significant research that adhered to biomedical concerns. The fellowship also gave her the opportunity to learn innovative teaching and mentoring skills that positively impacted her career development in academia.

Dr. Camp’s primary goal as an educator is to provide a learning environment that encourages the development of independent, critical, and creative thinkers equipped with essential skills to think as scientists. To achieve this goal, her teaching practices rely on creating an active learning environment that accommodates a variety of learning styles. She believes that acquiring scientific training as early as possible is very important, and she makes it a point to volunteer at local K-12 schools to expose students to chemistry at an early age. She also provides a welcoming laboratory environment so that all students interested in conducting undergraduate research will have the opportunity to do so.

As an Atlanta native, Dr. Camp is ecstatic to teach at Spelman College and be a part of the department of chemistry and biochemistry, a cohesive group whose main focus is to provide academic excellence, scientific training and discovery, as well as lifelong learning.

Dr. Camp’s research includes two different research topics, including a physical organic chemistry and medicinal chemistry. One research topic studies the synthetic capabilities of a highly efficient and stereoselective oxidant dimethyldioxirane, through a series of kinetic and mechanistic studies to improve reaction conditions and synthetic outcomes. The second topic is a novel medicinal chemistry study on the design and synthesis of small molecule inhibition that targets virulence factors that are not required for antimicrobial survival but are essential for antimicrobial pathogenesis.