Graduate Study - Department Facilities
Departmental Facilities
Research in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is supported by exceptional resources. In the past decade, the Department has undergone extensive expansion and renovation and is currently located in two adjacent buildings connected by the new Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences addition. Other recently completed work includes a new four story biochemistry wing, and extensive renovations to the chemical storerooms, the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance laboratory, and the electronics, machine, glassblowing, and instrument fabrication shops. This program has resulted in extensive and modern laboratory space for the Departments research activities.
The Department is also equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation and 25 support staff. The Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Laboratory has four high-field instruments, including multinuclear Varian 500 MHz, 400 MHz, and 300 MHz NMR instruments, which are primarily used by the synthetic organic and inorganic research groups within the Department. The facility is open 24 hours a day and students are trained to run and interpret their own experiments. The Department also has a number of other high-field NMR instruments that are used for the study of macromolecules.
The X-ray crystallography facility is equipped with two automated diffractometers, including a Siemens SMART CCD area detector system, with computational needs met by a network of desktop computers and UNIX workstations. Other on-campus computing facilities, including VAX clusters, an Alliant computer with parallel processing architecture, and a satellite link to the JVNCC supercomputers, are readily accessible to research students within the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Additionally, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, also located in Boulder, houses a Cray supercomputer which is available for specific research problems.
The mass spectrometry facility houses four mass spectrometers utilizing a variety of sample introduction and ionization methods. Other departmental instrumentation includes several Fourier transform infrared spectrometers, ultraviolet-visible spectrometers, a spectropolarimeter, an emission spectrograph, centrifuges, scintillation counters, numerous optical-laser facilities, and facilities for electron paramagnetic resonance and magnetic susceptibility measurements. Furthermore, individual research groups maintain and operate a variety of specialized equipment including X-ray diffractometers for protein crystallography, stopped-flow instruments, mass spectrometers, electrochemical instrumentation, gas and liquid chromatographs, inert atmosphere glove boxes, and other specialized equipment.