Our Research

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 21 st Century.

Research in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington is representative of the state-of-the-art of our discipline: It is exciting and new. It is vibrant and useful. It is interdisciplinary and disciplinary. Our faculty, our post-doctoral 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 research in the various areas of chemistry that are now underway in our department. These descriptions cannot begin to communicate the excitement of research; if the pursuit of chemistry is your passion, we hope you will visit us. If you do, experience tells us there is a good chance you’ll be back to study with us.