NYC area Chemistry programs

The Ph.D. Program in Chemistry at the Graduate Center is a collaboration of over 120 faculty at seven CUNY colleges and the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center creating new knowledge at the forefront of the chemical enterprise centered in the world’s most dynamic city. As the central science, chemistry is at the nexus of important societal challenges. Our faculty and students see these challenges as opportunities to creatively harness the transformational power of chemistry to affect solutions. The culture of CUNY involves smaller research groups than at other New York City institutions which allows for greater mentoring and interaction with faculty. The scale of CUNY provides both access to state of the art facilities and a rich diversity of expertise for chemical research.

Our Ph.D. program is unique in that it is consortial in nature. The program is administered by the CUNY Graduate Center with the doctoral faculty being drawn principally from CUNY colleges. The consortial nature of the program provides students with the best instructors for their courses, the widest range of mentors for their thesis research, and a rich and diverse faculty to assist them in their research endeavors.

The Department of Chemistry has a long tradition in the College of Arts and Science, dating back well before the founding of the American Chemical Society at New York University in 1876. Professor John W. Draper, the first president of the society and chair of the department, was a remarkable polymath: chemist, physician, philosopher, historian, and pioneering photographer.

The department has undertaken a major development plan, strengthening its faculty, instructional laboratories, course offerings, and research facilities in the areas of physical, biophysical, bioorganic, and biomedical chemistry, as well as in chemical biology, nanoscience, and materials sciences.

Graduates of the department find rewarding careers and achieve distinction in all phases of scientific life, from basic research to commercial product development. The late Gertrude Elion, a 1941 M.S. in Chemistry from New York University, shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for her research in pharmaceutical chemistry. Phil Baran (B.S. 1997), a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, was named a MacArthur Fellow for 2013.

For more than a century, the Columbia Chemistry Department has played a major role in the development of the study of chemistry in the US. Until World War II, Columbia University dominated the academic scene by numbers, graduating more PhDs and staffing more academic posts in chemistry than any other US university. Since the 1940s, graduate programs have grown and expanded at many other institutions, and now Columbia is known more for quality than for quantity. The department runs one of the best graduate research and training programs in the country, famous for its lively intellectual atmosphere and for the intensity of effort put forth by its faculty and students.

The central research mission of the Department of Chemistry at Columbia is to bring together diverse researchers across disciplines to perform cutting-edge research. Scientists in the department form collaborative relationships with their colleagues both inside and outside of chemistry, while still conducting fundamental research in their fields of focus.

The department is housed in three connected buildings: Havemeyer Hall, Chandler Laboratories, named for the famous Columbia chemist and founder of the American Chemical Society; and the Havemeyer Addition.

The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Stevens has a long history of innovation in education and research with excellence in laboratory instruction. Our curriculum is designed to provide interdisciplinary training, rigorous theoretical instruction, and exposure to experimental methods and state-of-the-art equipment.

Stevens graduate Chemistry program provides advanced education in Chemistry theory and experimental methods to students with undergraduate backgrounds in Chemistry. The graduate program connects students with distinguished faculty research, providing both theoretical instruction and experimental exposure throughout the course of study.

A multi-disciplinary collaborative environment emphasized throughout the university, provides for unique learning opportunities. In particular, the interdisciplinary Nanotechnology Graduate program allows Chemistry graduate students to study the behavior of matter at the smallest scales.

NJIT's Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science provides a unique focus for addressing some of today's most pressing environmental and chemical problems.

The department's research is supported by grants and contracts from industry and government sources, with principal strengths in the areas of molecular modeling, environmental analysis, hazardous waste minimization, biochemical processing, and solid-state and polymeric materials.

In addition to refineries and materials processors, New Jersey has the highest concentration of pharmaceutical companies in the nation, providing researchers with many opportunities for working partnerships with industry. Each year New Jerseans derive more than $5 billion in income from the chemical process industries (CPI), ranking the state first in the nation in that category.