About the Chemistry Department
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Minnesota Duluth offers degree programs in chemistry and in biochemistry and molecular biology at the baccalaureate and master's levels. The faculty are actively engaged in teaching and research, with expertise in the areas of analytical, biological, inorganic, organic, and physical chemistry. The Chemistry Building at UMD houses excellent research facilities with recently modernized laboratories for faculty/graduate student research, including special facilities for NMR and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry.
Major instruments for general spectroscopic investigations and structural characterization of compounds include a 300-MHz NMR spectrometer with multinuclear and variable temperature capabilities, Fourier transform infrared spectrophotometer, diode array UV-visible spectrophotometer, and a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer.
Other major instrumentation for general use includes additional UV-visible
and IR spectrophotometers, spectrofluorimeters, an atomic absorption spectrophotometer,
electrochemical instrumentation, and a number of gas and liquid chromatographs.
Examples of specialized research equipment include a McPherson RS10 high-resolution
emission/absorption spectrometer digitized for computer operation and used
primarily for study of rare-earth compounds, a supercritical fluid chromatograph
with high-speed data acquisition, and several UNIX Workstations and servers.
Faculty at the chemistry department have access to the digital imaging laboratory
on campus and to the Minnesota Supercomputer Institute in the Twin Cities,
a large scale facility with several laboratories. The department also houses
a graduate student computer lab with a number of IBM-PC compatible units and
modern software for word processing, spreadsheet, chemical structure drawings,
and molecular orbital calculations.
Research laboratories are supplied with ethernet connections to the campus network, with access to the UMD and Twin Cities library catalogs, the internet, and on-line literature searching utilities including Chemical Abstracts. The UMD library includes a large number of chemical journals, and copies of articles from additional journals are available through a very comprehensive interlibrary loan system. Students pursuing a graduate degree in chemistry with a mentor and emphasis in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology will also have available the research facilities of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology located in the UMD School of Medicine.
The Department features modern laboratories that include excellent cell and tissue culture facilities, a phosphor imaging and quantitative image analysis system, and all standard biochemical instrumentation. Such equipment includes ultracentrifuges, spectrophotometers, spectrofluorimeters, liquid scintillation spectrometers, thermocyclers, DNA sequencing and analysis apparatus, atomic absorption spectrophotometer, gamma counters, instruments for high pressure liquid chromatography, gas liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry, and a selection of physiological recording equipment and microscopes.
Shop facilities at UMD include machine shops in the Department of Physics and at the Natural Resources Research Institute, and electronics shops in the Large Lakes Observatory facilities and in the Department of Computer Engineering. All major shop facilities (glassblowing, machine, electronics) on the Twin Cities campus are also available.
