Including valuable undergraduate research in chemistry can be a very complicated endeavor. We usually require our Junior and Senior undergraduate students to take part in research as part of their degree requirement, but it has proven challenging to provide enough resources and time to allow every student to have a research experience. One alternative approach has been to introduce research elements into our laboratory schedule of our Upper level undergraduate classes.This has many advantages, as usually our students do not have enough background knowledge to perform cutting edge chemical research on their own, and they usually do not have enough time in their busy schedule to perform adequate research. Our approach for the last two years has been multifold: assign small assignments and research tasks that are part of the overall project, assign students in pairs, and have weekly meetings to report progress. Our approach is also based on gathering limited experimental data, and complementing all the data with computational chemistry analysis. Our focus has been on studying the spectroscopy of newly synthesized anthraquinones, and analyses their excited states, in both their native forms, and their reduced/radical states. This involves synthetic work, followed by experiments in electrochemistry, computational chemistry and spectroscopy, and involves classes such as Physical Chemistry, Instrumental Analysis and Inorganic Chemistry.

Incorporation undergraduate research elements in some upper-level laboratory classes at a predominantly undergraduate institution

251st National Meeting (2016)

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.