Our new 80,000-square-foot biology and chemistry building, dedicated on September 19-20, 2003 on the sites of Waugh Hall and Thomas Laboratories, provides flexible teaching spaces, research laboratories located directly across from faculty offices, and a number of small, public gathering places designed to encourage students to work together in informal groups.  View photos of our science equipment.

The new building includes the following:

• 1,100 data outlets
• Integrated labs
• Balance and instrument rooms
• Laser lab
• Superconducting NMR spectrometer
• Greenhouse
• Two molecular labs
• Cold and Warm rooms
• An animal facility
• Reading room overlooking the Fuller Arboretum

The Department boasts of a fine collection of "standard" instrumentation, such as a diode-array UV-Vis spectrophotometer, an FTIR spectrometer, a scanning UV-Vis spectrophotometer (new), a spectrofluorimeter (new), two gas chromatographs and two modular HPLC systems.  A central theme of our curriculum is that students have hands-on use of all Department instruments.

Instruments which are not routinely found in chemistry departments in other small colleges include:

• A 400 MHz multi-nuclear, super-conducting Fourier Transform nuclear magnetic resonance (FT-NMR) spectrometer for use in teaching and research.
• A fully-equipped laser spectroscopy laboratory, featuring a pulsed Nd:YAG laser system and a high resolution Raman spectrometer system, used to study the structures and dynamics of transition metal complexes.
• A new GC/Mass Spec (gas chromatograph with quadrupole mass spectrometer detector) for analysis of complex mixtures.