About the Department

The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is comprised of 9 tenured or tenure-track faculty, two instructors, a stockroom coordinator with part-time instructor responsibilities, and our Department Assistant.   Faculty and students do research in the traditional areas of analytical, physical, organic, and inorganic chemistry, as well as biochemistry with direct applications to the defense of our nation, the environment, energy, pharmaceuticals, and the petroleum industry. 

Study of Individual Differences

Why do individuals seek reward, avoid danger, and take risks differently? Bill Potter, Professor, and Robert Sheaff, Assistant Professor, are members of the Institute of Biochemical and Psychological Study of Individual Differences.

The goal of this Institute is to employ Biochemical and Psychological  studies to analyze the structures and signals of the major adaptive emotional  systems. This Institute focuses on human individual differences in the systems that control the seeking of reward opportunities, the avoidance of dangers, risk-taking, risk analyses, and an individual's capacity to build realistic cognitive models of external reality.

The settings, structures and signaling in the adaptive emotional systems differ from individual to individual. Broad patterns emerge in which some individuals, for example, are highly responsive to signals of new opportunities and potential rewards, but others fail to see those possibilities. Some individuals readily detect danger and threat, but others go too far, sensing danger when none exists.  Some individuals are oblivious to clues of impending danger. These enduring patterns emerge in psychological studies as personality individual differences. Personality individual differences are conceptualized as the enduring parameters of briefly acting dynamic emotion systems.

The Institute works to understand the dynamic modulation of genetic and other biochemical features of these emotion systems. We are currently investigating the effects of threat signals in people with known psychological variations in the personality traits of Negative-Emotionality, and Disconstraint/Sensation Seeking and known biochemical variations in serotonergic and catecholamine systems, cortisol and corticotropic releasing hormone receptors and other hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis signals.

There are approximately 100 undergraduate majors in chemistry and biochemistry.  Our graduate programs lead to either the M.S. or Ph.D. degree.  The Ph.D. degree is new in 2009 and the department anticipates 3-6 graduate students admitted each year in the combined programs. 

The undergraduate curriculum in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry includes extensive laboratory experience culminating in a senior research project, since students are expected to become involved in undergraduate research as a capstone for their education.  Graduate students take core courses in either a physical or life sciences core, and then select electives from a wide range of classes before conducting independent and unique research with a faculty mentor.

Our department has a long history of training students who go on to achieve success in many disciplines.  Moreover, we consistently have students winning awards at the college level and in nationally competitive scholarships like the Goldwater, Truman, Udall, or Ford Foundation Scholarships, the Phi Kappa Phi Fellowships, or go on to become National Science Foundation Fellows.