Joel Karty earned his BS in chemistry at the University of Puget Sound and his PhD at Stanford University. He carried out postdoctoral work with Stephen Craig at Duke University and began teaching at Elon University in the fall of 2001, where he currently holds the rank of full professor. At Elon, Joel teaches primarily the organic chemistry sequence and general chemistry, as well as physical chemistry. In the summers, he teaches an organic chemistry preparatory course as part of the SMDEP program at the Summer Biomedical Sciences Institute sponsored by the Duke University School of Medicine. His research interests include studying the contributions by resonance and inductive effects in fundamental chemical systems, and he also investigates the mechanism for pattern formation in periodic precipitation reactions (such as the Liesegang phenomenon). Joel is the author of the very successful student supplement, The Nuts and Bolts of Organic Chemistry (2005), which has gone into its second edition as Get Ready for Organic Chemistry (2011).