Chemistry

What sets Prin apart?

You’ll find our small, close-knit community of educators and learners a huge asset in your quest to master the basic principles of chemistry and prepare for your future career or graduate training. With four well-equipped, modern laboratories all housed in the Science Center, you’ll find that help and consultation with faculty and fellow students is always in easy reach. What else makes us different?

• Our 6:1 student-to-faculty ratio gives you invaluable access to faculty.
• We’ve developed exciting internship opportunities with a variety of companies and organizations, including Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, Coca-Cola, Chevron, and Colgate-Palmolive.
• You’ll be prepared to continue your education at some of the top graduate schools in the country.
• You’ll have plenty of hands-on learning opportunities—tracking pollution levels in area rivers and streams, conducting experiments in the forensic lab, and using gas chromatography to discover how octane levels relate to the makeup of gasoline.
• You can join our award-winning solar car team—building and racing in the U.S. and around the world (often beating teams from M.I.T. and larger research universities).
• Department’s instrumentation:
  • Nuclear magnetic resonance
  • Gas chromatography/mass spectrometry
  • High-performance liquid chromatography
  • Raman spectroscopy
  • X-ray diffraction
  • UV-visible spectroscopy
  • Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
  • Electron paramagnetic spectroscopy
     

You’ll engage in original research and present your findings to the College community at the end of your senior year. Recent projects explored:

• Bioremediation of diesel fuel in soil
• Non-Newtonian fluid enhancement of Kevlar vests
• Multi-step synthesis of chrysanthemic acid
• Microplastics in the Mississippi River
• Chocolate analysis for fat and carbohydrates
• Isolation of oil from Jatropha seeds
• Supercritical fluid extraction of eugenol oil from cloves