Paul Brandt (Chemistry) and Bill Kwochka (Chemistry) recently received a $180,00 National Science Foundation grant to purchase a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer to be used specifically in undergraduate Chemistry classes. The grant from The National Science Foundation's Instruments for Lab Improvement program provides $90, 000, which will be equally matched by WCU to enhance undergraduate education. The new instrument will be used in at least four courses in the Chemistry department beginning in spring 1999: CHEM 272 Organic Chemistry Lab, CHEM 370 Instrumental Analysis I, CHEM 372 Chemical Syntheses, and CHEM 432 Instrumental Analysis II. The instrument, which Brandt describes as very similar to an MRI (Magnetic Resonance Instrument) with which many people are familiar if they've ever been injured, is used to determine the qualities of a chemical. It does so by using a central magnet to determine the signal given off by the nuclei of certain atoms&emdash;the atoms combine to make the chemical. The magnet is "super-cooled," meaning it requires liquid helium and liquid nitrogen to get it working; yet once it is charged, it is magnetized forever, and if a person stands close enough to the instrument, it is strong enough to "pull a wrench from your hand and your keys from your pockets, and wreck your credit cart," Brandt says. Brandt and Kwochka's grant proposal was challenging to construct because they based it upon environmental chemistry, and the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer is most often used to determine the structure and quality of chemicals. Environmental chemistry instead is usually interested in quantity.

However, this difficulty would become one of the proposal's strengths: acquiring the instrument enables the Chemistry department to augment its focus on "Green" chemistry, thus enhancing their undergraduate and graduate programs. "Green" chemistry focuses on the reduction of organic pollutants in manufacturing to be replaced with water, or focuses on how to replace environmentally unfriendly compounds with more friendly organic compounds. A number of experiments proposed by Brandt and Kwochka, which their WCU undergraduate students will be performing, with the new Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer will determine the qualities of compounds and create new compounds which haven't been made before. Brandt, Chair of the Department of Chemistry, has been teaching at WCU since 1992, having received his in Chemistry from the University of Colorado. His research in synthesis of organometal compounds, particularly how they are useful for catalysis (speeding up chemical reactions), has been published in Organometallics, Inorganic Chemistry, The Journal of the American Chemical Society. He was a finalist for the College of Arts & Sciences Teaching Award in 1996-97. Kwochka came to WCU in 1994 after receiving his Ph.D. in Chemistry from North Carolina Sate University. He has published in Organic Chemistry and held a National Science Foundation Visiting Scholar Grant this summer at Virginia Tech where his research involves synthesis, creating macrocyclic rings to be used in semi-conductor technology.