Chemistry is the central science. Chemists are able to design and create new forms of matter that can possess extraordinary and sometimes even useful properties. Chemists can explain the behaviors of matter that non-chemists find mystifying. For these reasons, progress in many fields depends upon contributions and advances from chemists and chemistry. Our field is flourishing as we enter the 21st century.
Research in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington is representative of the state-of-the-art in our discipline: it is exciting and new. It is vibrant and useful. It is interdisciplinary and disciplinary. Our faculty, our postdoctoral research associates, our graduate students, and our staff (nearly 400 of us in all) have come from all over the world to pursue our shared passion: the discovery of new chemistry!
We hope you will take a moment to read the brief descriptions of ongoing research in the many research areas explored in the Department of Chemistry. These descriptions cannot begin to communicate the excitement of research; if the pursuit of chemistry is your passion, we hope you will visit us to learn more about our program. If you do, experience tells us there is a good chance you’ll be back to study with us.
UW Chemistry Faculty Lead UW to Top Citation Impact in Materials Science
The University of Washington led the world in impact of publications in materials science research during the period 2001-2011 according to a recent report by Thomson-Reuters. More...
Jen et al. describe nanoscale molecular control in Science
Professor Alex Jen and his co-workers have reported in Science the ability to foster an extremely unlikely chemical reaction between two molecules by tethering them into the correct orientation on a gold surface. More...
Spinning Quantum Dots reported in Nature Nanotechnology
Prof. Daniel Gamelin and postdoctoral fellow Dr. Stefan Ochsenbein report the first successful coherent impurity spin manipulation within colloidal semiconductor nanocrystals (also known as quantum dots) in Nature Nanotechnology. More...