Undergraduate Research

The ultimate form of learning chemistry is practicing chemistry, and we encourage our students at all levels (freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors) to become involved in high-quality research. In fact, research is a requirement for chemistry majors.
We have research opportunities available in: colloid/surface chemistry, materials science, environmental chemistry, toxicological study, computational chemistry, pharmaceutical chemistry, and organic synthesis.
Students regularly present their research findings at undergraduate   research symposia and National ACS meetings.
Students are coauthors on published research in professional journals.

The Department of Chemistry has demonstrated a strong track-record of providing increasing research opportunities for undergraduate students.

Undergraduate students are main participants in all aspects of research, from performing experiments and analyzing data to presenting findings at professional conferences. Most students who participate in research present their research at local and national meetings, and they have co-authorship of published peer-reviewed articles. 

Latest Highlights

A selected list of Chemistry undergraduate student research activity include: (undergraduate student names are underlined)

(1) "Towards Polymorph Control in an Inorganic Crystal System By Templated Nucleation at a Microdroplet Liquid Interface: Potassium Hexacyanoferrate(II) Trihydrate", Loreta Geneviciute, Nick Florio, and Sunghee Lee, Crystal Growth & Design, DOI: 10.1021/cg200628a, 2011.

(2) "Visualizing Microdroplet Fluidic Reactions One Droplet at a Time," Sunghee Lee and Joseph Wiener, J. Chem. Edu. 88 (2), 151-157, 2011. (Featured as Cover Art in February Issue of J. Chem. Edu. 2011)

(3) "Effect of Specific Anion on Templated Crystal Nucleation at the Liquid- Liquid Interface," Sunghee Lee, Paul Sanstead, Joseph Wiener, Remon Bebawee, and Aileen Hilario, Langmuir, 26 (12), 9556-9564, 2010.

(4) "Controlled Nucleation of K3Fe(CN)6 in Isolated Microdroplets at Liquid-Liquid Interface," Kristin Allain, Remon Bebawee, and Sunghee Lee, Crystal Growth & Design, 9 (7), 3183-3190, 2009.