Most of the faculty in the Chemistry Department have on-going research projects and welcome student researchers. You can obtain chemistry credit for your research work through courses such as CH 297 and 298 for freshman and sophomores and also CH 490 and 491 for juniors and seniors .


Research interests of faculty are listed below. For more details about a particular faculty member’s research projects check out faculty web sites on the faculty listing page.

Brandon Canfield—medicinal plant chemistry, environmental/analytical chemistry, separation and analysis of plant secondary metabolites and their response as a function of environmental stressors.

Maris Cinelli--- medicinal plant chemistry, using mass spectrometry to profile plant metabolites and discover new natural products with possible future drug potential. Analytical chemistry of plant-insect interactions.

Ara Kirakosyan—Metabolite profiling. Exploring the therapeutic potential of natural products. Unraveling the synergistic or antagonistic effects of the biologically active constituents at their target sites.

Yu (Leo) Liu—organic chemistry, synthesis of nano-device based catalytic systems, new cooperative catalysts development and catalytic reaction mechanism studies.

Don Marquardt—organic chemistry, synthesis of novel aromatic compounds such as fullerenes, free radical chemistry.

Frankie McCormick—organic chemistry, synthesis of compounds with novel electronic properties and radical chemistry synthetic methods.

Mark Paulsen—physical and biochemistry/theoretical chemistry, computer modeling of enzymatic reactions and protein-protein interactions.

Evan Pratt—the design, development and application of fluorescent sensors to study cellular metals and key metabolites in live mammalian cells.

Lesley Putman—plant biochemistry, phytoremediation of PFAs using hemp.

Lee Roecker—inorganic chemistry, synthesis and reactivity of colbalt (III) compounds coordinated by thiourea or thioether ligands.

Alex Wilson—specialized metabolism of medicinal plants, structural changes in enzymes cause change in function, uridine diphosphate (UDP) dependent glycosyltransferases (UGTs) and shikimate dehydrogenases (SDHs).

Philip Yangyuoru—develop high-throughput methods to probe the folding of nucleic acid sequences into noncanonical secondary structures especially G-quadruplexes and i-motifs, explore formation and stability of nucleic acid structures to develop biosensors for biomarkers, develop methods to study how nucleic acid structures can be modulated by proteins and small-molecule ligands.