This week's News & Observer Tar Heel of the Week is Royce Murray, a chemist at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Murray, 73, is in his 50th year on the faculty in Chapel Hill. Yep. 50 years. The periodic table was smaller back in 1960. He's been around for a while.

But it isn't about longevity. It's about the longtime professor's influence on his students, co-workers and, in fact, the physical plant of the campus he's called home now for half a century.

It seems about every time I hear that Knightdale High School needs to become more academically rigorous, I visit the school and meet a star student.

I know that test scores need to go up to give students the opportunity they need to succeed in school and that offering more advanced placement classes will boost student achievement.

But I want to put in a word for what goes right at Knightdale High School.

I met student Chelsea Sumner this week and was overwhelmed with her knowledge, ability to articulate that knowledge and the depth of her understanding on a project in chemistry.

Chelsea is a student who was chosen to participate in SEEDs, a science enrichment program she attended at N.C. State. She was partnered with a professor and helped with academic and lab research. She completed experiments the results of which will aide scientists in brain mapping so they can see and measure mood modulators.

Other people have been impressed with Chelsea's mastery of chemistry as well. She's won three awards in chemistry competitions. She won first place in the local American Chemical Society competition, was a finalist in the Neuroscience Research Project, a national award.

And finally, as a winner of the North Carolina International Science Challenge, she will go to Beijing, China next month to participate in a youth science celebration.

The knowledge in those heady awards started out in a chemistry classroom at Knightdale High School. They not only speak well of Chelsea, but of her alma mater as well.

When James Bonk started teaching chemistry at Duke University, the periodic table had 100 or so elements. It now has 118 and Bonk is entering year 51 of a career so well-regarded on the Duke campus that his course was for many years known simply as "Bonkistry".

Bonk is a midwesterner by birth but fled to Durham after graduate school at Ohio State and never left. "You can only shovel eight-foot snow drifts for so long before the novelty wers off," he astutely points out.

Bonk recently talked to us about his career and the changes he's seen. Here are excerpts.

 What's the most dramatic change in how you teach chemistry?

I suppose you'd have to say the computer. In the good old days it was mostly chalk and a blackboard. But nowadays you have powerpoint and videos and dvds. You have a whole bunch of things that we certainly didn't have in the beginning.