{ leading research }
ACCELERATING DISCOVERY By Kim Proukou ’06M and Lindsay Key ’11MFA
A $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation has enabled UNCW’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry to acquire a 600 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. It permits researchers to investigate the nature and effects of chemical interactions more accurately and with greater sensitivity. The new NMR was required to fulfill current and future research and teaching needs. It will augment the department’s aging 400 MHz NMR and will be used not only by chemistry and biochemistry faculty but also by biology faculty and researchers at the Center for Marine Science. Now, UNCW researchers and their students have access to the new NMR and to new differential scanning and isothermal calorimeters that augment more than $2 million of sophisticated experimental and computational chemistry department resources, including electrochemical analyzers, a gas chromato-
graph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS), ultraviolet-visible (UV-VIS) spectrophotometers, Fourier Transform infrared (FTIR), fluorescence, optical emission and atomic absorption spectrometers, gas and liquid chromatographs, and soon, two Liquid Chromatography Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS) systems. The new and existing facilities will accelerate discovery for researchers and give graduate and undergraduate students access to state-of-the-art instrumentation to apply their learning and advance their research skills.
Experiment in Progress All matter has chemical properties, but each molecule is unique. Chemists continuously solve fresh puzzles by recognizing patterns, collecting and mining large data sets to reveal molecular structure. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) techniques yield important pieces of structural information that allow researchers to propose molecular function. Information about form and function is key to the efficient design of new drugs and drug delivery systems as well as many other applications.
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