Research Facilities

Computer and NMR Facilities

The Department is currently utilizing UIC's Extreme supercomputer cluster. The cluster is equipped with Intel Xion E5 processors, high-memory nodes having 1TB RAM, Infiniband (QDR) high-speed network and two high capacity storage systems. Most computational chemistry software programs and compilers (such as Gaussian09, Amber, NAMD, Gromacs, R, python, matlab, Java, intel compiler, etc.) are available for Chemistry users. Some faculty members in the department have their own computer clusters. The director of the facility oversees the installation and maintenance of hardware and software and assists users with any inquiries that they might have. One faculty member is also available to help users perform computational research and to maintain user list with the extreme supercomputer cluster. In addition to these facilities, individual faculty members can also gain access to national supercomputer clusters such as at the XSEDE (Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment) and Argonne's Computing Facility.
Please contact Shahid Islam for more information.

The NMR Facility has five high-field Bruker NMR spectrometers: AVIII 750, AVIII 500, AVI 500, DRX 500 and DPX 400. These are maintained by the director of the NMR facility. The AVIII 750 and DRX 500 also supports solid-state NMR experiments. There is also a room temperature 42 MHz Magritek spectrometer used for organic chemistry teaching labs. Please see the NMR Facilities site or contact Dan McElheny for more information

Shop Facilities and the UIC Research Resource Center

The Department of Chemistry runs a fully equipped Machine Shop staffed with skilled instrument makers. This staff builds research equipment that is not commercially available.The department also has an Electronics Shop which can design digital and analog equipment and work with students who wish to develop electronics skills. In addition, there is the Glass Shop which can build non-commercially available research glassware.

UIC has university-wide centers for research, such as the Center for Structural Biology, which is a state-of-the-art facility to support cutting-edge research using various forms of calorimetry and spectroscopy, including a 900 MHz NMR spectrometer. The university is continually modernizing the Research Resource Center (RRC) in the building that houses the Department of Chemistry. Currently, the RRC contains several electron microscopes including an aberration corrected JEM-ARM200CF STEM/TEM, as well as several other X-ray, NMR, and optical-based analytical instruments. The RRC also has a significant infrastructure for conducting Mass Spectrometry studies. For more information about the RRC, please visit the Research Resources Center site.
The university's Nanotechnology Core Facility (NCF) is dedicated to developing integrated circuit and fiber optic technology, MEMS/Nano devices, BioMEMS, Microfluidic, Electromechanical, Mechanical, Chemical, Optical, Photonic and multi-functional devices. For more information, please see the NCF web site.

Major Research Equipment

Much of the department's equipment is localized in specialized laboratories operated by individual research groups; see the faculty page for more information. Some examples are provided below:

• TA Instruments SDT Q600 for combined thermogravimetric analysis-differential scanning calorimetry.
• Bruker D8 Discover microdiffractometer equipped with monocapillary focusing optics (maximum resolution: 10 um) and a Vantec-500 detector.
• Bruker D8 Advance powder diffractometer with Bragg-Brentano and Debye-Scherrer (capillary) capabilities.

Research and Support Facility Links
NMR
Mass Spec
Computing
RRC