Facilities & Resources

The Chemistry department building complex consists of the Pearson research & teaching building and the Michael research building. The department houses first-rate instruments and facilities for modern chemical research. Department instrumentation includes two multinuclear NMR spectrometers (Bruker Avance 300 and Avance III 500), a Bruker single crystal x-ray diffraction instrument, a Bruker EPR spectrometer, Thermo LTQ LCMS Shimadzu GC-MS and Bruker MALDI-TOF mass spectrometers, AA, ICP-OES, several FTIRs, UV-Vis and fluorescence spectrometers, XPS/UPS, SEM, and a range of bioanalytical tools and equipment for biological chemistry and chemical biology work. The department also maintains a variety of HPLC's, capillary GC's, as well as an in-house stockroom, professionally staffed electronics and machine shops, and a student machine shop. Research groups operate multiple scanning probe microscopes (STM, AFM), a wide variety of pulsed and CW laser systems for analytical and physical measurement, a variety of potentiostats for electrochemistry, and UHV surface analysis equipment (Auger, RAIRS), and Q-tof MS for analysis of biomolecules. Additional instrumentation, such as three NMR spectrometers (400 MHz, 500 MHz and soon a 600 MHz), are available at the nearby Tufts Medical School, and a variety of instruments for the preparation and characterization of materials are available on campus at the Engineering School.

Brochure of instruments

Tufts University Academic Computing Services provides and supports a variety of computing services to faculty and students. Additional computing resources are available on a variety of workstations available within the department. The Tufts high speed 1-GHz Ethernet system provides networking to computers and workstations located throughout the department as well as access through a high speed T1 fiberoptic and vBNS connections to the Internet.

The research interests of many of the faculty at Tufts are interdisciplinary, and numerous opportunities exist for collaborative research both within and outside of the university. The Tufts Medical, Dental and Veterinary schools, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, and the Friedman School of Nutrition Policy & Science, one of only two nutrition centers in the country, are easily accessible. The department encourages and supports collaborative research with other departments and institutions as well. Examples include collaborations with pharmaceutical companies to find potent new anti-cancer agents, with engineers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in areas of biomedical instrumentation, bioengineering, biotechnology and systems biology, and with NASA's research centers in exploring the geochemical and potential biological environments on other planetary bodies such as Mars and Europa. Tufts long-standing tradition of supporting environmental research and collaborations between the Chemistry Department and the departments of Biology and Civil & Environmental Engineering, as well as with Tufts Institute for the Environment, exemplify interdisciplinary environmental chemistry research at Tufts. Tufts' proximity to a host of leading universities and industries fosters cooperation with researchers outside the university and provides convenient access to additional advanced research facilities.

The Tufts University Libraries support the educational and research programs of the university through services to students, faculty, and staff. The principal library on the Medford/Somerville has recently undergone a major renovation and expansion that has nearly doubled its size. The new Tisch Library's resources consist of over 875,000 books, 30,000 electronic journals, 20,000 electronic books and 20,000 video recordings. Features and facilities include easily accessible open stack areas, seating for over twelve hundred, AV and computer-equipped classrooms connected to the university network, group study rooms, and computerized literature searching services. The Rockwell Reading Room in the chemistry complex is a branch of the Tisch library that provides Tufts chemists with in-house access to current issues of selected chemistry journals. Tufts' affiliation with the Boston Library Consortium provides Tufts students and faculty with access to the resources of eleven additional academic and research libraries in the Boston area. Department members also have free access to on-line journals from the major publishers, and resources such as the CAS SciFinder Scholar, ISI ChemServer, Science Direct, Ovid, and the ISI Web of Science.