Laura Trout, an educator at Lancaster Country Day School and materials coordinator at Lancaster-based national nonprofit The POGIL Project, has been named the winner of the 2024 James Bryant Conant Award in High School Chemistry Teaching, presented by the American Chemical Society.

The award, established in honor of James Bryant Conant, seeks to recognize, encourage, and stimulate outstanding teachers of high school chemistry in the United States, its possessions or its territories at the national level. The award is sponsored by the Journal of Chemical Education and ChemEdX. Conant was an American chemist, the president of Harvard University and an ambassador to West Germany, and he was instrumental in the development of synthetic rubber and the Manhattan Project.

Trout has a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from Central Washington University and a Master of Science in chemistry from the University of Washington. She has been teaching for 30 years in both public and private schools in Washington state and Pennsylvania and has been at Lancaster Country Day School since 2008.

For most of her career, she has taught chemistry at various levels - college prep, honors, Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate. For some of those years, she was the STEM coordinator for an elementary school - consisting of students in prekindergarten through fifth grade - and served as department head at two high schools.

Trout has been using POGIL activities in her classes since 2000. She became involved with The POGIL Project in 2004 and has been writing and implementing guided inquiry activities, facilitating POGIL workshops, and serving the POGIL community ever since. She served as the editor-in-chief for the High School POGIL Initiative (HSPI), which produced four POGIL activity books for high school - biology, chemistry, AP Biology and AP Chemistry - and is currently authoring a collection for AP Environmental Studies. She joined The POGIL Project as its materials coordinator and oversees the creation and dissemination of workshop materials for the project's professional development sessions.

Trout also helped to produce a lab manual for AP Chemistry for PASCO Scientific, which utilizes POGIL techniques. She was a member of The POGIL Project steering committee for two terms. In 2021, she earned the 2021 DivCHED Award for Excellence in High School Teaching for the Middle Atlantic Region of the American Chemical Society.