Thank you for visiting our website. We are a leading research and teaching-intensive department centrally located in the LSU Baton Rouge campus which has been voted as one of the ten most beautiful campuses in the country. Our faculty are extremely research active and at the same time are committed to its tradition of excellence in teaching at the undergraduate and graduate level. We are very proud of the many accomplishments of our students and alumni and of the dedicated support staff.  Our faculty excel in winning awards and grants for both research and education. As a result, we have LSU's largest PhD program and recently have doubled our number of majors.  Also, we are one of the best-equipped Chemistry departments in the United States, most recently we have been awarded and have invested well over two million dollars in NMR equipment.   Baton Rouge is large enough to offer many indoor and outdoor activities, excellent restaurants and shopping, etc. but still small enough to have a College-town flavor. Our local culture is unique and is a derivative of many other cultures, including French, African, Italian, British, German, Hungarian, and Spanish, just to name a few.  In closing, if you still have some unanswered questions about the LSU Department of Chemistry, please feel free to contact me by E-mail.

Department Chairman  
Prof. Andrew Maverick
232 Choppin Hall  
Phone: 225-578-3465

Department Overview

FACULTY

The Department of Chemistry has 31 tenured or tenure-track faculty with 50% or higher appointments, 30 of these are considered to be research-active based on the publication of scientific articles in refereed journals over the last four years.  Several faculty members (Kevin Smith, Frank Cartledge, and Isiah Warner) have upper administration appointments that limit their departmental service and/or teaching duties.  A summary listing of the research-active tenure-track faculty is shown on the next page. 

Of the 30 research active faculty, 9 are junior level (assistant or associate level) hires that are in the first 7 years of their tenure-track career.  The Department of Chemistry, therefore, has a good fraction of young, very active faculty members.  Four new hires in 2003 and 2004, Jayne Garno, Evgueni Nesterov, Doug Gilman and Bin Chen,  have continued the addition of extremely talented faculty to the department: 

The focus areas of the research-active tenure-track faculty are as follows:  7 Analytical, 4 Macromolecular, 6 Inorganic, 7 Organic and 6 Physical.  A number of these faculty members have interdisciplinary interests in fields such as biophysical, bioorganic, bioinorganic, and organometallic chemistry.  There is an active Macromolecular Studies Group that contains faculty from Chemistry, Chemical Engineering, Biochemistry and Physics.

The most critical measure of excellence is faculty quality and accomplishments.  A few facts here are pertinent:  8 Chemistry faculty have been awarded Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships while at LSU (Julia Chan being the most recent); 5 have received national awards of the American Chemical Society (Isiah Warner being the most recent); 6 have attained Boyd Professor rank, the highest rank in the LSU system (Isiah Warner being the most recent), and Prof. Isiah Warner holds one of the first Endowed Chairs in the College of Basic Sciences.  A second $1M endowed chair in Chemistry, the Patrick F. Taylor Chair for the Environmental Impact of Hazardous Waste, was filled by Prof. Barry Dellinger in 1998.  Several of our junior faculty have won prestigious national awards, including most recently: Rob Strongin (Beckman Young Investigator Research Award), David Spivak (Research Corporation Cottrell Young Faculty Award), and Julia Chan (Margaret C. Etter Early Career Award from the American Crystallographic Association, and a Sloan Foundation Faculty Fellowship); and Britt Thomas, David Spivak , Julia Chan, Kermit Murray, Gudrun Schmidt, Doug Gilman, Bin Chen, Robert Cook and Evgueni Nesterov have all received NSF CAREER Awards.  Julia Chan was also profiled in Chemical & Engineering News in June 2002 as one of 12 outstanding young female chemists likely to make a major impact on chemistry for the next century.

GRANT SUPPORT

The amount of extramural research grant support received by the Department of Chemistry has dramatically increased over the last 17 years and is summarized below:

The Department of Chemistry is well funded and has consistently been ranked at least #2 in the College of Basic Sciences for the amount of research grant support received.  It is quite significant that the Department of Chemistry has increased its funding by almost a factor of 5 between 1986 and 2004.  In fact, Chemistry has historically been one of the top funded research programs at LSU.  For 3 of the last 4 years it has been the #1 department for research funding on a per faculty member basis (Chemistry is smaller than both Physics & Astronomy and Biological Sciences).  The receipt of the new $9M NSF-EPSCoR grant headed up by Prof. Steven Soper involving a large campus multidisciplinary research effort into "lab on a chip" research is the most recent sign of the vigorous research activity of our faculty.  

Of the 30 research active faculty, all but 6 (and three of these are new Assistant Professors) have extramural research support, and 23 faculty have major federal grants.  A summary of the major federal grants is as follows: 13 NIH, 19 NSF, 1 EPA, 2 DOE, 1 NIEHS, and 1 USDA grant.  Of the 13 junior faculty hired in the last decade, all but one (aside from the newest three assistant professor hires) has major state or federal funding.  Based on the influx of research active junior faculty, their success in obtaining significant federal extramural funding, and the additional hires expected over the next 5 years, we anticipate that the Department will surpass $9M in annual funding in 2005/06 and could top $12M by 2010.  Similarly, the department has made major strides over the last 5 years in the acquisition of state-of-the-art instrumentation in a number of areas.  The newest addition is a $1.6M NSF funded 700 MHz cryoprobe NMR spectrometer (installation in 2005-06). 

STUDENTS

Graduate Student Profile (Fall 2004)

159 Students (154 Ph.D., 5 M.S.)                67 Female, 92 Male

77 US citizens:

40 Caucasian Americans, 33 African Americans, 3 Asian Americans, 1 Hispanic American

82 International students (25 countries)

22 (China), 12 (Kenya), 6 (Korea), 6 (Romania), 5 (Philippines), 4 (Turkey), 4 (India), 3 (Ghana), 2 (Cyprus), 2 (Eritrea), 2 (Saudi Arabia), 1 (Benin), 1 (Bulgaria), 1 (France), 1 (Iran), 1 (Mexico), 1 (Nepal), 1 (Sierra Leone), 1 (Sri Lanka), 1 (Suriname), 1 (Sweden), 1 (Taiwan), 1 (Tanzania), 1 (Trinidad), 1 (Zimbabwe)

Residency

Current Graduate Student Support (some students have multiple appointments)

 9 Board of Regents Graduate Fellowships ($20K/yr for 4 years, tuition exempt)
 4 Economic Development Fellowships ($25K/yr for 4 years)
 2 Huel Perkins Fellowships ($14-15K/yr for 4 years, supplemented up to normal stipend)
 5 NSF-IGERT Fellowships
 6 Other Fellowships (full or partial support)
59 Research Assistants (external grants & contracts)
76 Teaching Assistants
 7 Self support
39 Graduate School Enhancements @ $5K/yr, 39 Graduate School Supplements @ $3K/yr,
  5 AGEP/GAELA

Degrees Awarded

                   * estimated