The Chemistry Department, in the F. W. Martin Science Building, is staffed by four full-time faculty members and a laboratory support technician. The department offers courses in all areas of chemistry, and is proud to have been certified by the American Chemical Society as a department offering a high quality bachelor’s degree program. This distinction of offering an ACS-certified degree is shared by only a handful of Liberal Arts colleges in the state of Virginia.

The department maintains an impressive array of quality analytical and research instruments, including a 60 megahertz F-T NMR instrument, Ultraviolet, Infrared, Atomic Absorption, and Fluorescence spectrophotometers, several lasers, an HPLC, and a gas chromatograph with mass spectrometer. Because class sizes are small, each student has the chance to work closely with professors and gain extensive experience on a variety of instruments.

Outside the standard lecture and laboratory courses, each student participates in a senior research project which allows her to work one on one with a faculty member. In addition to research within the department, students may also participate in off-campus research programs or internships. Recent chemistry majors have been accepted to internships at local hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and in prestigious research programs including Duke University and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Our majors are talented and hard-working, and have been rewarded with admission to many of the top graduate chemistry programs in the country. Recent graduates have been accepted at University of Michigan, University of Southern California, University of Virginia, University of Leeds (England), University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and Purdue, to name a few.