Future Perspectives

Chemical research, by its very nature, is future-oriented. As a leading house for research — despite its large undergraduate enrollment, D-CHAB is already a graduate school — the links to the individual research programs of the 37 professors display prominently the future of Chemistry. One accelerating trend may not be evident in any individual program, though. While we are committed to further strengthening of the central disciplines in the chemical sciences, covering these core areas in their full depth and scope, we seek to exploit new opportunities at the interfaces between traditional disciplines. Fruitful, synergistic interactions between chemistry and physics, on the one hand, and chemistry and biology, on the other. Chemistry naturally plays an important role as one component in an integrated solution. The role is arguably a central role, because chemists “make things,” and any endeavor to build complex systems ultimately comes to the creation of new things. The core study and manipulation of structure-activity, structure-function, or structure-property relationships means that the chemist’s way of looking at the world is an ideal springboard for leadership in the integrated R&D of the future.