The Department of Chemistry is revising its entire upper-level undergraduate physical chemistry curriculum and is introducing a new Computational Chemistry Laboratory Course to be required of the 60 to 100 chemistry and biochemistry majors graduated each year and to be elected by a number of chemical engineering and cellular/molecular biology majors. The object of this new course is to acquaint the students through hands-on experience with three major areas of computational chemistry, namely the use of symbolic mathematics programs in manipulating and graphing analytic relationships, the use of semi-empirical and ab initio electronic structure programs in studying molecular energies and structures, and the use of molecular modeling programs in further characterizing molecular structures and reaction processes. To this end, this project provides support for the acquisition of a set of 21 Macintosh PowerMac computers and the necessary software packages. The equipment is being housed in newly renovated laboratory space in the Science Learning Center (located in the Chemical Sciences Laboratory) and Ethernetted to the Departmental Computing Facility with its high-end workstations and electronic structure software. Through their computational chemistry laboratory experiences, the students can gain skills and insights that enhance their lecture course and conventional laboratory studies of physical chemistry.
