One of the deficiencies of the undergraduate chemical education is a lack of emphasis on current laboratory experiments that directly relate to frontier chemical research. This project implements several surface chemistry experiments to study gas adsorption on oxide-supported metal catalysts, a student research project to study the mechanism involved in the hydroformylation of olefins and two new experiments in organic chemistry phenomena, surface science and ultra vacuum techniques as well as insights into several fundamental chemical concepts. This instrumentation, which includes a FTIR, a vacuum-gas line specially designed for surface chemistry studies and a temperature controller for temperature-dependant studies, provides undergraduate the much needed exposure to some current major direction is chemical research and some hands-on experience in state-of-the-art instrumentation. The institution is matching the NSF grant with an equal amount of funds.
