Welcome | Department of Chemistry

Welcome to Chemistry

The Central Science. Chemistry is the link that connects problems in the fundamental nature of matter to the most complex problems in the processes of life. Members of our department bring chemistry to life as cutting-edge researchers and as teachers for students across the university. Undergraduates majoring in chemistry can go on to several professional fields, including medicine and graduate study, and are also in high demand in fields like secondary education. Our Ph.D. program has a history of cutting edge and often interdisciplinary research that will teach you to be an independent scientist, ready for a career in industry or academia.

Quality Teaching in Chemistry

The Chemistry Department takes pride in its teaching as well as its research. Several faculty have been recognized with college or university-wide awards for teaching and advising, including Professors Burnett, Greenbowe, and Jenks were all honored with awards in 2009 and Professors Pohl and Miller were recognized in 2008. A listing of all recent awards is given here.

Our commitment to teaching is also reflected in our desire to build a community environment and provide every opportunity of success for our undergraduates. Toward that end, we will be initiating a Chemistry Learning Community for our first year and transfer students. Please click on Undergraduate Program in the navigation bar to the left for more information.

The Department of Chemistry is pleased to announce three new faculty members who will be joining us.

Dr. Levi Stanley comes to us from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign were he is a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow working with Professor John F. Hartwig. He will join the faculty in January of 2012. His area of research is organic and organometallic chemistry, catalysis and asymmetric synthesis.

Dr. Jason Chen is currently a post-doc at the Scripps Research Institute under Dr. K.C. Nicolaou. His areas of research interest include organic synthesis and chemical biology. He will join the faculty in the fall of 2011.

Dr. Wenyu Huang has recently worked with Dr. Gabor Somorjai at the University of California Berkley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He will join the faculty in the fall of 2011 and his research is in nanomaterials, catalysis and renewable energy.