General Information

Degree Programs

The Department of Chemistry offers programs of study leading to the bachelor of arts (B.A.), bachelor of science (B.S.), and master of science (M.S.) degrees, and participates in UMKC’s interdisciplinary Ph.D. program. The department has about 30 interdisciplinary Ph.D. students, 10 master students and over 220 undergraduate chemistry majors. Graduate students can specialize in the traditional fields of analytical, inorganic, organic, physical, or polymer chemistry.

Emphasis Areas

Organic chemistry: synthesis and molecular architecture of bile acids and benzenoid hydrocarbons; synthesis and physical studies of novel host-guest systems; total synthesis of complex natural products; development of new synthetic methods; development of new scaffolds and reagents for combinatorial chemistry; medicinal chemistry; chemical biology; synthesis and elucidation of natural products and antitumor agents; biomimetic materials chemistry of cyclodextrin derivatives; and immobilized enzymes for green enantioselective catalysis of organic reactions.

Inorganic chemistry: bioinorganic chemistry, including synthetic and mechanistic coordination chemistry of essential and toxic metal ions; inorganic reactions including thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of metal-ligand interactions in aqueous and other media; correlation of electronic structure calculations with experimental measurements; bioinorganic chemistry of the heaviest metals; development of new synthetic methodology to novel organic-inorganic hybrids; and polymer-silicate composites.

Analytical chemistry: gas chromatography, mass spectroscopy, and Fourier transform infrared, Raman and positron annihilation spectroscopy techniques.

Physical chemistry: using infrared and Raman spectroscopy to determine molecular conformations, developing infrared spectroscopic techniques for the analysis of environmental pollutants, using ab initio and semiempirical computational methods to predict chemical and physical properties of interesting chemical species; quantitative structure activity relationships; physical and biological properties of dental materials; characterization of electronic and free-volume properties in polymeric, solid-state and biological materials; positron and positronium chemistry; biophysical structural investigations of amyloid proteins by solid-state NMR.

Polymer chemistry: synthesis of novel organic and organometallic polymers; light harvesting dendrimers and their applications; core-shell hybrid nanoparticles as functional materials; hybrid polymers for molecular electronics; characterizations of electronic/optical/photophysical properties of polymers; study of free volume, phase transition relaxation phenomena, and gas diffusion of polymers and polymer blends; and semiconducting polymers.

Research Facilities

The Department is housed in the Spencer Chemistry Building and the Robert H. Flarsheim Science and Technology Hall. Over 35,000 square feet of space are currently available for chemistry teaching and research.

Undergraduate teaching laboratories exist for general, organic, analytical, instrumental, physical and polymer chemistry. At the graduate level, there are 23 research labs and common areas containing major research and teaching instrumentation. Within these labs, most types of spectrometers and chromatographs can be accessed by students and faculty, and excellent computational chemistry facilities exist. Specialized research equipment in the areas of radiochemistry and laser photodissociation mass spectrometry is also available.

• Major Instrumentation:
  Varian Inova 400 MHz NMR
  Bruker 250 MHz NMR with solid state probe
  Bruker ER200-D ESR spectrometer
  Bruker 360 MHz wide-bore solid-state NMR (Oyler)
  Perkin Elmer AA  spectrometer
  Leeman Labs ICP-AE spectrophotometer
  CARY-1 UV-Visible dual beam spectrophotometer
  Raman and Infrared spectroscopy lab (Durig)
  Positron annihilation and gamma-ray spectroscopy lab (Jean)
  ABI Pioneer peptide synthesizer
  Sprint BioCad liquid chromatography system
  Finningan MAT double focusing mass spectrometer
• Research Instrumentation:
  Ocean Optics UV-Vis-NIR and other UV-Visible spectrophotometers
  Metrohm Titrando system with "PC Control" software
  BAS Epsilon electrochemistry apparatus (Peng)
  Shimadzu HPLC (Van Horn)
  Shimadzu RF-5301PC fluorescence spectrophotometer
  Cambridge structural database subscription (Van Horn)
  Perkin Elmer polarimeter (Buszek)
  Jasco J-710 Circular Dichroism spectropolarimeter (School of Biological Sciences)
  Varian 600 MHz NMR spectrometer (School of Biological Sciences; Laity)
  ESI-mass spectrometer and Triple-Quad LC-ESI MS with nanospray adaptor (School of Pharmacy)
  

On-Campus Resources and Support Facilities

• Chemistry Computing Lab (SCB 110)
• Chemistry Stores (SCB 117)
• Computer and Electronics Shop (SCB 111A)
• Machine Shop (Department of Physics)
• The Miller Nichols Library
• The Linda Hall Library of Science, Engineering and Technology (2 1/2 blocks away, maintains active subscriptions to 16,000 serials and houses a collection of more than 150,000 technical books.)
• Pathway
• Blackboard

News

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