Centers, Institutes, and Programs

The Department is home to a number of centers, institutes, and programs, which transcend the traditional boundaries between disciplines and create a synergy between scholarship, research, and teaching.

AirUCI - An NSF-funded Environmental Molecular Sciences Institute that focuses on research into chemical reactions at the air/water interface and how they affect the atmosphere.

Clathrate Hydrates - An interdisciplinary collaborative research project that seeks to understand the unique class of substance in which water molecules form a crystal lattice with open cavities that can cage guest gas molecules, such as hydrogen, methane or carbon dioxide, without chemical bonding.

Institute for Surface and Interface Science (ISIS) - An Organized Research Unit (ORU) that brings together faculty and researchers from a variety of science and engineering departments to study phenomena that occur at the boundaries between phases of matter.

The graduate program in Chemical and Materials Physics (ChaMP) is designed to prepare M.S. and Ph.D. scientists for modern careers in Physical Sciences, where cross-disciplinary education with an emphasis on applications is in increasing demand.

The graduate program in Chemical Biology is designed provide students with expertise in both chemistry and biology, while training students to communicate effectively and perform research at the chemistry-biology interface.

The new graduate program in Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacology (MCP) was established in 2007. This gateway program is offered by the Departments of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chemistry, Pharmacology, and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry at UCI. The program is designed to interface medicinal chemistry with organic synthesis, pharmacology, and structural biology as they relate to the practice of drug discovery and the structure to function continuum. Research leading to a PhD degree in the students' choice of participating departments will focus on chemistry-driven, biology-inspired paradigms.

The Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI) on "Chemistry at the Space-Time Limit" is an NSF-funded center aimed at developing the experimental and theoretical apparatus to interrogate molecules and chemical change with sub-atomic resolution and in real-time. A multi-pronged approach is taken to marry modern microscopies with ultrafast nonlinear spectroscopy to directly visualize the inner workings of molecules, one molecule at a time.

Established March 1, 2007, the School of Physical Sciences Center for Solar Energy is a new Center that supports research aimed at increasing our understanding of how light from the sun can be converted into electrical and chemical energy. Presently, solar energy provides an insignificant fraction (< 1%) of our overall energy needs and fundamental scientific breakthroughs will be required to change this status quo. Research within the School of Physical Sciences Center for Solar Energy will seek to identify and solve "bottlenecks" in fundamental science that impede our ability to carry out these energy conversion processes efficiently.