Facilities & Resources

Faculty members in Department of Chemistry at Vanderbilt are engaged in a broad range of multidisciplinary research at the leading edge of chemical sciences. This research is supported by a strong departmental and institutional commitment to infrastructure, instrumentation and personnel at Vanderbilt.

The Instrumental Laboratory, managed by Dr. Grace Zoorob, is located on the fourth floor of Building 5 of the Stevenson Center in room 5401. The laboratory is open for use to all members of the chemistry research community. Equipment in the facility includes:

• Saturn GCMS
• Voyager DE-STR MALDI-TOF-MS
• API 2000 LC/MS/MS
• Cary 100 UV/Vis Spectrophotometer
• In addition to HP GCMS, Beckman HPLC, Spectrofluoremeter, and Scanning probe microscope.

The departmental NMR facility, managed by Dr. Donald Stec, is well equipped for small molecule structural analysis. Departmental NMR facility houses the following instrumentation:

• 500 MHz Bruker Avance FT-NMR spectrometer
• 500 MHz Cryoprobe LC-NMR (NSF grant awarded; equipment to arrive 2006)
• 400 MHz Bruker DRX-400 FT-NMR spectrometer
• 300 MHz Bruker DPX-300 FT NMR spectrometer

Adjacent to the small molecule NMR facility is the Biomolecular NMR facility which is available to all Vanderbilt faculty, staff and students and managed by Markus Voehler, staff spectroscopist. Equipment in the Biomoleculat NMR facility includes:

• 800 MHz Avance FT-NMR spectrometer
• 600 MHz Avance FT-NMR spectrometer with cryoprobe
• 600 MHz Avance FT-NMR spectrometer
• 500 MHz Bruker Avance FT-NMR spectrometer with cryopropbe

The departmental mass spectrometry facilities, include electrospray LC/MS and MALDI and GC/MS instrumentation for routine analysis of synthetic and analytical samples. Additionally, the Vanderbilt Mass Spectrometry Research Center provides Vanderbilt faculty and students with world class mass spectrometry facilities and expertise including:

• ThermoQuest Finnigan TSQ-7000 LC/MS (3 systems)
• Perceptive Biosystems Elite MALDI-TOF
• HP GC/MS
• ThermoQuest Finnigan GC/MS
• Proteomics lab including an Ettan 2D Difference Gel Electrophoresis (DIGE) system, Multidimensional liquid chromatography / tandem mass spectrometry in-gel digestion / mass spectrometry system, bioinformatics / protein identification phosphopeptide analysis software.

Other major research equipment available within the department includes a powder X-ray diffraction system, a rotating-anode X-ray diffractometer, X-ray photoelectron spectrometers, a secondary-ion mass spectrometer, laser microprobe mass spectrometer, UV-Vis, FT-IR, and Raman spectrometers, an electronic circular-dichroism spectrometer, high-resolution continuous wave and ultrafast laser spectrometers, a fluorimeter, an oligonucleotide synthesizer, an atomic-force microscope, polarimeters, a surface area and porosity analyzer, and a high-resolution thermal gravimetric analyzer. Other more common instrumentation, such as HPLC systems or capillary GCs, are available throughout the department.

Other University Research Facilities

In addition to traditional core facilities, chemistry graduate students also benefit from the availability and proximity of other research facilities on campus. A vast array of interdisciplinary research at Vanderbilt is ongoing within specific instrumentational or programmatic centers:

• Vanderbilt Center for Structural Biology
• Computational Resources
• Center in Molecular Toxicology
• Vanderbilt Cancer Center
• Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology