Our chemistry department is doing some of the most impactful research at the university and around the world. The department's 21 regular research faculty comprise one of the highest external research grant-generating departments at S&T. Our emphasis on excellence in research and creativity has moved our programs to the forefront of science. The department supports a broad range of research performed by internationally recognized faculty competing at the leading edge of technological research.
The department provides programs in analytical, inorganic, organic, physical, and biochemistry, as well as in more specialized areas including polymer and coatings, electrochemistry, bioanalytical chemistry, cancer biology, colloids, corrosion, environmental chemistry, kinetics, organometallic chemistry, reaction mechanisms, atmospheric sciences, solid state chemistry, chemical instrumentation design and development, spectroscopy and theoretical chemistry. A number of our faculty are involved in efforts which have been organized into several centers or institutes including the Missouri S&T Coatings Institute, the Materials Research Center, the Cloud and Aerosol Sciences Laboratory and the Center for Single Nanoparticle, Single Cell, and Single Molecule Monitoring. Financial support is available from research grants for advanced students.
The department of chemistry, along with the department of biological sciences, is housed in the recently renovated Schrenk Hall and features modern teaching and computer laboratories and research facilities. The department has a number of technical support personnel to provide assistance with laboratory instrumentation, hardware, and computers. Departmental instrumentation and instrument training are available to the entire campus community (https://chem.mst.edu/research/depart-instr/instr-training).
The department's Shared Instrument Lab (https://chem.mst.edu/research/depart-instr/shared-instr) holds a suite of state-of-the-art research instrumentation, incuding a Thermo Nicolet iS50 FTIR with built-in ATR, Magritek Spinsolve Carbon benchtop NMR, Shimadzu QP-2020 GCMS, Edinburgh Instruments FS5 fluorescence spectrometer with lifetime measurement capability, Agilent Cary 5000 and Varian Carey 50 UV-visible spectrophotometers, Thermo Vanquish HPLC with diode array detector, TA Instruments Q2000 differential scanning calorimeter, TA Instruments Q500 thermogravimetric analyzer, Varian CP-3800 GC, Jasco P-2000 digital polarimeter, Exeter CE-440 elemental (CHN) analyzer, Electrothermal Engineering M-2341 melting point apparatus, Sartorius ME-5 Series Ultramicro balance, Dymax Model 5000 UV curing oven, and CEM MDS-2000 microwave reactor oven.
Specialized instruments (https://chem.mst.edu/research/depart-instr/specialized-dept-instruments) available elsewhere in the department include a Bruker-AXS D8 single-crystal X-ray diffractometer, Bruker Dimension Icon atomic force microscope, Renishaw inVia Raman microscope, Nikon A1R/Ti2E confocal microscope, WissEl Model W302 low-temperature Mössbauer spectrometer, and Amnis CellStream flow cytometer. The department also houses an extensive collection of additional instrumentation in the various research groups.
The departmental Institute for Applied NMR Spectroscopy (https://chem.mst.ed/research/nmr-institute/) houses a Bruker 400 MHz Avance III HD Liquid State NMR with multinuclear liquid, diffusion, and variable-temperature capabilities, a Bruker 400 MHz Avance III Wide-bore Solid State NMR, and a Bruker 200 MHz Avance DRX Wide-bore NMR with multinuclear liquid and toroidal cavity capabilities.
Research groups have free access to the campus centralized computing facility which includes new high-performance computing hardware (https://itrss.mst.edu/cluster/foundry). Neutron diffraction is on hand at the Missouri S&T High Flux Reactor (https://nuclear.mst.edu/research/reactor). Facilities for studying very fast combustions and explosions, as well as a variety of new and innovative techniques for characterizing high-energy materials, are provided in the Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center (https://explosives.mst.edu).