Welcome to the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Riverside
Our Department, and indeed the UC Riverside campus, continues to be in a period of rapid growth: outstanding faculty continue to join our Department, the numbers of graduate and undergraduate students continue to increase, a new chemistry building has been built, research institutes are being created in multidisciplinary areas of the Chemical Sciences and state-of-the-art instrumentation continues to be added to our Analytical Chemistry Instrumentation Facility (ACIF) to support our research programs. These changes are making our Department and Campus even stronger and more diverse, and are making our Department even more attractive as a place to study Chemistry at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.
Our most important resources are our students and faculty. There currently are 34 faculty in our Program, including 10 who hold the title of Distinguished Professor, and 11 other faculty that hold joint or adjunct appointments in our Department. Over the past decade we have averaged two new faculty hires every year and we expect this expansion in our program to continue. The strong support of the campus in providing for new faculty startup needs has been a major factor in our success hiring outstanding new faculty. Our faculty are very successful in securing grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other funding agencies to support their research programs. The strength of faculty research programs is reflected by the major awards they have received, and by the frequency that their research is highlighted in Chemical and Engineering News and in high profile journals such as Science and Nature.
Our Department provides an outstanding environment for graduate studies in Chemistry. We are well equipped with state-of-the-art instrumentation, including NMR, mass spectrometry, optical spectroscopy and x-ray crystallography instrumentation, in the ACIF and more specialized instrumentation in individual research laboratories. We currently have approximately 160 Ph.D. graduate students in our program, the largest in our College. The most recent US News and World Report ranks our program in the top quartile nationally and we expect the steady rise in the rankings to continue. Our graduate program has been awarded multiple multiyear awards for graduate student training through the NSF Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need program. The combination of federal training grants, financial support from the campus Graduate Division, teaching assistantships, and research assistantships from faculty research grants, provides continuous financial support for students throughout their graduate studies.
- Len Mueller
Chemistry Chair