Our faculty is supported by federal research grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, as well as private foundations. They act as strong mentors in the lab and in the field for teams of graduate students and undergraduate students, working side by side to apply their knowledge real-world challenges as an engaged community of principal investigators, postdocs, and both graduate and undergraduate students. We are also closely partnered with DU's Molecular and Cellular Biophysics program and the Knoebel Institute for Health Aging.
Detecting aerosols, novel metabolites, small molecules, and unpaired electrons—how radical! These are the goals of the analytical chemistry groups at DU, who strive to push the boundaries on measurements to see things never before seen. Projects cover a range of interdisciplinary subfields: from detecting and understanding the composition and chemistry of aerosol particles in the atmosphere; building new instruments and techniques from scratch (EPR); designing molecular systems that detect other molecules; and finding all molecules present in complex systems like the gut microbiome. We aim to push analytical boundaries to enable novel discovery.
What underlies and drives life? How do we develop treatments for disease? These questions drive biochemists and chemical biologists at DU, who use many chemical and biological techniques to probe into the deepest and most pressing issues about the fundamental processes and building blocks of life and how to build and manipulate molecules to address concerns ranging from intractable disease to world-threatening environmental problems.
Innovative synthesis with a purpose. Research groups participating in chemical research at DU are dedicated to solving societal, technological, and biological problems with synthesis. Whether that be by creating molecules that fluoresce in the presence of trace gas, developing catalysts that create functional polymers, harnessing light to generate complex molecular scaffolds in a single step, or designing drugs that combat neurodegenerative diseases. Although diverse interests can be noted among the chemical research groups at DU, we share a common goal of purpose-driven synthesis.
Physical chemistry and instrument design are the basis for the study of chemical compounds and biological materials. Electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy, quantitative fluorescence microscopies and computational analyses are developed to study fundamental chemical processes, protein structure, and cell function.
