Overview

Undergraduate education, including meaningful research experience, leading to the development of highly skilled and motivated young scientists, is a major goal of the Chemistry Department at the University of Virginia. This goal is accomplished by nationally and internationally recognized research active faculty who take a personal interest in the students, the latest in equipment and instrumental facilities, and by a departmental library containing about 19,000 reference books and journals. Close faculty/student interaction is encouraged by the presence of about 25 faculty, about 60 postdoctorals, and around 130 graduate students. Classrooms, research laboratories with professors' offices, library, stockrooms and shops are all located in the same building.

Educational areas and research opportunities cover a wide range of modern chemistry offerings including molecular structure, analytical methods, synthetic inorganic and organic chemistry, and spectroscopy. Our courses reflect the reality that chemistry is truly a multidisciplinary field with old internal divisions fading or disappearing. Indeed, collaborative interdisciplinary research with other departments drawn from across the Schools of Arts & Sciences, Engineering ,and Medicine is a common place activity.

Ongoing, forefront research in the analytical areas uses laser spectroscopy, atomic and molecular emission, mass spectrometry, electron spectroscopies, scanning tunneling microscopy, chemometrics, and IR spectroscopy. Applications include surface and interfacial phenomena, plasma and polymer chemistry, trace metal analysis, archeological studies, forensic science, geochemistry, protein and DNA sequencing and environmental monitoring.

Various active groups work in the general areas of bio-organic, bio-inorganic, and biophysical chemistry. Studies involve protein structure and function, transmission and expression of genetic information, metabolic mechanisms and control, design and identification of new cancer and other drugs, membrane biochemistry and liposome technology, and membrane processes (energy conversion, biological signaling and transport). Research at the interface with inorganic systems includes mechanistic studies of metalloenzymes, metal toxicity (e.g., Al), the importance of metal ions in macromolecules, and synthesis of models of active sites.

In addition to bio-inorganic and physical inorganic, work in the inorganic and organometallic areas encompasses transition and main group elements, and solid state chemistry. Some groups work in the design, synthesis, and applications of novel species of reagents for synthesis. Areas of interest include new catalysts, high temperature and analytically useful polymers, novel low-dimension polymeric materials with unusual conductivity, multi-decker stacked organometallics, molecular probes of biological systems, and luminescence based sensors.

In the general area of organic chemistry several groups are actively involved in synthesis of natural and unnatural species, isolation and characterization of biologically active natural products, organic synthetic applications of organometallics, characterization of mechanisms of biological oxidation and metabolism of toxic materials.

In physical chemistry the Department has broad strengths in experimental and theoretical spectroscopy with emphasis on molecular spectroscopy and connections to reaction dynamics, kinetics, and chemical reaction mechanisms. Some representative study areas include intramolecular energy transfer, the reaction dynamics of catalysis on surfaces, the theory of supercritical fluids, protein structure determination, enzyme reaction and structural kinetics, and the atom-by-atom construction of highly reactive and unusual species trapped in low temperature matrices. The Department is well known for its work in high resolution IR/µ-wave double resonance molecular beam spectroscopy, surface chemistry, matrix isolation spectroscopy, circularly polarized absorption and emission spectroscopies, and, increasingly, ultrafast laser spectroscopy. High powered, tunable femtosecond lasers are available in the Chemistry Department and the Free Electron Laser laboratory at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Va.