Rosé may be known for his eccentricity, but he is famous for his devotion to teaching. His "Pestilence and Civilization" curriculum just won him $20,000 in the 2002 Young Epidemiology Scholars (YES) Teacher Competition.

Sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and administered by the College Board, the YES Teacher Competition awards high school teachers who incorporate epidemiology into their curricula. Rosé is one of the eight teachers that won the contest and one of the three national winners.

Having researched HIV for almost six years during his graduate studies at UC-San Francisco, Rosé is no stranger to epidemiology, a branch of medicine that studies the causes, spread and control of diseases in populations. In his "Pestilence and Civilization" class, students examine eight major infectious diseases and their social impact.

"For everything we study I want students to get an appreciation of how much our response to a disease or our failure to respond to a disease has altered history, shaped traditions," Rosé says.

He says a good example is smallpox. When Hernando Cortez landed in Mexico in 1519, the diseases his 400 Spanish soldiers brought were more deadly than their military power. In eight months the Aztecs had died of smallpox and other diseases of European origin.

"That basically changed the course of South American history," Rosé says.

"Pestilence and Civilization" has become one of the most popular classes in the school since Rosé started teaching the course four years ago.

Rosé says he will use the award money to lead a research team to Brighton, England this summer to study an outbreak of smallpox that occurred between 1761 and 1762. When researching family history, his wife's uncle found church documents recording the fact that about 20 percent of the city's population died of smallpox in 1761.

"What's interesting about the project is that no books have mentioned anything about the epidemic," Rosé says. "I'm going to find out what happened."

Besides infectious diseases, Rosé also teaches chemistry, which many students consider a challenging subject.

"The difficult part of learning chemistry is that you have to think in the abstract all the time," Rosé says. "When you see a desk, you have to see the atoms of the desk. I feel I succeed when my students look at the sunset and say it's really cool to see the electrons jumping around."

Rosé says he understands the frustration his chemistry students feel because that was exactly how he felt when he learned chemistry in high school. But his own teacher helped him overcome the hurdle.

"She was very instrumental in exciting my interest," Rosé explains. "She pushed me to do my best and got me interested in studying it further in college. I think that I can have the same effect on students here."

But for Rosé, what makes chemistry interesting is a license to blow things up. Every Halloween, he and his advanced placement chemistry students create a new way to blow up pumpkins.

"I really like the excitement of watching pieces go in different directions," Rosé says. "Everybody likes a good bang. Between terror and entertainment lies chemistry."

His student Alex Fthenakis still remembers his first chemistry class.

"Doc mixed some chemical with a rod, and 'bang'!" Fthenakis explains. "He asked us what he had just done. One student said he had made fire. Then Doc said he would teach us all about this. Now I have learned a lot of ways to make fire."

Fthenakis says the more screams Doc can get from students, the more Rosé enjoys his demonstrations.

But Fthenakis says what makes Rosé a great teacher is his willingness to help students. The blue bench in front of Rosé's classroom is called the "chemistry bench" because students always sit on the bench to wait to ask him questions. He and his wife, Marie, a physics teacher at King's Academy, also invite students to their 100-year-old Victorian home for study marathons.

Rosé says he spends a lot of time with students because he wants to share his knowledge with them.

"When I was doing research at Stanford, I was so bored since I could only talk to mice and nobody knew about the cool stuff we were doing," Rosé says. "But when I teach, I feel I can make an impact on the students' lives."