A team led by chemistry professor Paul Hergenrother and former graduate student Emily Geddes (PhD, '22) has discovered the physical and chemical rules for overcoming the defenses of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium responsible for tens of thousands of hospital infections every year in the U.S.
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BTN Documentary: "The New Normal"A Big Ten Network documentary details the 2020 journey of researchers from various disciplines across the University of Illinois campus, including the Department of Chemistry, to create a fast and inexpensive COVID-19 test to ensure that students, faculty and staff could remain safe and healthy during the pandemic.
Latest ResearchChemistry researchers conduct cutting-edge research in a variety of areas
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Discovering natural products with speedGraduate students and postdoctoral researcher explain their interdisciplinary, collaborative project that integrates AI and machine learning with automation.
A fifth-year PhD student who grew up on a farm in rural Ohio, Katherine Hatzis is involved in researching fundamental surface science of gold nanomaterials and engagement and outreach activities like the "Bonding with Chemistry" Day Camp for youth and also teaches English as a Second Language classes in Urbana.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and collaborators at the University of Wisconsin-Madison report in the journal Nature that a new antifungal molecule, devised by tweaking the structure of prominent antifungal drug Amphotericin B, has the potential to harness the drug’s power against fungal infections while doing away with its toxicity.
More Department News
- The School of Chemical Sciences invites graduate and undergraduate students, postdoctoral associates/fellows, and staff members within the school, including the departments of chemistry and chemical and biomolecular engineering, to submit computer-assisted or traditional scientific images designed...
- A new study led by professor Ying Diao brings fresh insight into the development of semiconductor materials that can do things their traditional silicon counterparts cannot – harness the power of chirality, a non-superimposable mirror image.
- An anticancer compound developed in the collaborative labs of Cancer Center at Illinois (CCIL) researchers Paul Hergenrother, a professor of chemistry at Illinois, and David Shapiro, a professor of biochemistry, has been licensed for pre-clinical development. The biotech company Oncoteq recently...
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Spotlight
Ruth Eliza Okey, first woman PhD graduate in the Department of Chemistry at Illinois In the early 1900s, Ruth Eliza Okey attended Monmouth College in Monmouth, Ohio, to major in chemistry, “because she liked it.” She also majored in German, because she was told “no woman could make a living as a chemist,” Okey recalled in an autobiographical essay that was published in the Journal of Nutrition after her death in 1987 at the age of 94. From Monmouth, Okey went on to become the first woman to graduate from the University of Illinois with a PhD in chemistry in 1918, after...
Research Areas in Chemistry
- Analytical Chemistry
- Chemical Biology
- Inorganic Chemistry
- Materials Chemistry
- Organic Chemistry
- Physical Chemistry
