CITY COLLEGE
The City College
Convent Avenue and 138 Street
New York, NY 10031
Located in the Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Manhattan at the hub of a circle of universities and medical centers, the City College campus is one of the prominent centers of higher learning of New York City. The College is easily reached from all parts of the city via subway or bus. The campus is also convenient to the major cultural and recreational attractions of New York City.
City College was founded in 1847 under the name "Free Academy". In the beginning of the 20th century, it relocated to new neo-Gothic buildings at its current location. City College was the first college of the City University of New York (CUNY), a consortium that now numbers 19 colleges in the five boroughs of New York City. In 1961, when the Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan was formed as the doctorate-granting institution of CUNY, City College became active in that consortium providing faculty, laboratories and research centers in support of doctoral level education. In 1972, the Department of Chemistry moved into new quarters occupying one-third of the thirteen-story Marshak Science Building. This building is shared with the departments of Biology, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Physics, and the Biomedical Program and also houses the Science Library, a pool, and a gymnasium.
City College has long been known for excellence in undergraduate education. It has traditionally provided high quality education to students from immigrant and low-income families and it continues to do so today. The public investment in human potential has paid off great dividends: four chemistry graduates have gone on to win a Nobel prize and another twenty have become members of the National Academies of Science or Engineering.
Over the last 40 years, research has also been a central part of the mission of the City College Chemistry department. Research interests of the faculty encompass the entire range of modern chemistry and biochemistry, including nanotechnology, surface chemistry, materials chemistry, electrochemistry, laser spectroscopy, quantum chemistry, organometallics, mechanisms of inorganic and organic reactions, synthetic organic chemistry, environmental chemistry, enzymology, molecular biology, structural biology, biological NMR, and experimental and theoretical biophysical chemistry. Major instrumentation includes 600 MHz and 500 MHz multinuclear Fourier-transform NMR spectrometers (including solid state capability), a 300 MHz NMR spectrometer, electron microscopes (SEM and TEM), an FT-IR instrument, x-ray diffractometers, a CD spectrophotometer, a DSC microcalorimeter, a mass spectrometer, light scattering equipment, well-equipped molecular biology facilities, molecular beam epitaxy and cluster beam apparatus, picosecond and femtosecond lasers, two Linux clusters, as well as a protein x-ray crystallography facility currently being installed. In addition to a full array of research and teaching laboratories, the department has a large number of special purpose facilities such as cold and constant temperature rooms, clean-rooms, an electronics shop, and a glass-working shop, and it shares an animal facility and precision machining shops located in the building.
The Chemistry department looks to the future with great excitement. The faculty ranks have been enriched in the past few years by many new hires who bring a new vitality to our research and teaching. A new research building on the South Campus is scheduled to open in 2009, in close proximity to the New York Structural Biology Center, the planned CUNY Advanced Research Science Center and the new CCNY Dormitory. Together with the planned expansion of Columbia University into Manhattanville, these projects will make West Harlem an internationally recognized center for research and education.
Doctoral Faculty and Research Interests
Daniel L. Akins
Professor, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley , 1968
Physical: Spectroscopy and dynamics of adsorbed dyes on surfaces by linear and nonlinear Raman scattering techniques; electron transfer in aggregating porphyrin systems.
Theodore Axenrod
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., New York University, 1961
Organic: Nitrogen-15 nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy; organic mass spectrometry; stereochemistry; energetic materials.
Valeria Balogh-Nair
Professor, Ph.D., University of Louvain, Belgium, 1976
Organic: Synthesis and mode of action of bioactive substances.
Teresa Bandosz
Associate Professor, Ph.D., Technical University of Crakow, Poland, 1989
Analytical: Adsorption of pollutants; surface characterization; new sorbents and catalysts; adsorption/desorption phenomena; gas separation.
Ronald L. Birke
Professor, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965
Analytical: Electrochemistry, redox chemistry of vitamin B12 and porphyrin compounds; electrodeposition studies; electroanalytical chemistry of pollutants; theory and methodology of pulse polarography and square wave voltammetry; surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy at electrodes; Raman and theoretical structure calculations of molecules on surfaces.
Vernon G. S. Box
Professor, Ph.D., University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica, W.I. 1971
Organic: Natural product synthesis; bio-organic chemistry; molecular modeling; theoretical organic.
Ranajeet Ghose
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Yale University
Biochemistry: Development of novel NMR methods to probe the structural and dynamic determinants of protein function. Systems of interest include proteins involved in intracellular signaling pathways.
David K. Gosser
Professor, Ph.D., Brown University, 1985
Analytical: Electroanalytical chemistry; low temperature and time resolved electrochemistry; data analysis and simulation in chemistry; electron transfer in biological systems.
Michael E. Green
Professor, Ph.D., Yale University, 1964
Physical: Gating mechanism of channels in biological membranes; Monte Carlo simulations of water in confined spaces; ab initio calculations on proton transfer.
Urs Jans
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland, 1996
Environmental Organic: Abiotic transformations of contaminants (agrochemicals, dyes, solvents) in natural aquatic environments and engineered systems.
George John
Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Kerala, India
Organic: Nanotechnology and materials; biotechnology; green chemistry
Glen R. Kowach
Associate Professor, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1997
Inorganic, Physical, Nanotechnology and Materials: Synthesis, structure, properties and reactivity of solids; single crystal growth of gallium nitride; doping and fabrication of zinc oxide thin films; synthesis of multicomponent glasses for integrated planar optical waveguide devices.
Mahesh K. Lakshman
Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Oklahoma
Organic synthesis: Chemistry of modified nucleosides and DNA studies on chemical carcinogenesis and transition metal mediated synthesis.
Themis Lazaridis
Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Delaware, 1993
Physical: Theoretical and computational biophysics; protein folding; molecular recognition; thermodynamics of biological processes; statistical thermodynamics of solvation.
John R. Lombardi
Professor, Ph.D., Harvard University, 1967
Physical: Application of lasers to infared, Raman, and optical spectroscopy of chemical as well as biochemical species; multiphoton effects and electrode surfaces; theoretical studies in momentum space.
Neil McKelvie
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1961
Henri Rosano
Professor Emeritus, D.Sc. University of Paris, 1951
Physical: Monolayers; membranes; polymers; aerosols; emulsions; microemulsions; surfactants; phase changes; ultralow interfacial tensions; artifical blood substitutes.
Charlotte S. Russell
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1951
Organic and Biochemistry: Chemistry and biology of heme biosynthesis: identifying the genes and proteins involved in catalysis and regulation of the pathway.
Kevin Ryan
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Rochester, 1996
Organic and Biochemistry: medicinal chemistry; bio-organic chemistry; RNA chemistry and processing.
Maria Tamargo
Professor, Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 1978
Physical: Molecular beam epitaxy of II - VI and III - V semiconductors; liquid phase epitaxy; growth and properties of semiconductor thin films and multi layers.
Maria-Luisa Tasayco
Associate Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1989
Biochemistry: Protein folding and protein-protein interactions; application of H-exchange experiments, multidimensional nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, far and near UV circular dichroism and other complementary tools from biophysics, biochemistry, chemistry and molecular biology to establish the basic principles underlying structure, stability, dynamics and folding of proteins.
Iban Ubarretxena-Belandia
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Utrteecht, The Netherlands
Biochemistry: Structural biology; molecular biophysics.
Zhonghua Yu
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Columbia University, 2000
Physical and Nanotechnology: Synthesis and self-assembly of nanocrystals and nanorods; single molecule spectroscopy of nano-materials and conjugated polymers; magneto-optics and electron spin dynamics of magnetic semiconductor nanocrystals.
Barbara Zajc
Associate Professor, Ph.D., E. Kardelj University of Ljubljana, 1989
Organic: Regioselective fluorination of bioactive molecules; synthesis and study of fluorinated carcinogen analogs and their DNA conjugates; chiral recognition studies of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon derivatives by polysaccharides; development of new synthetic methods.
Members of the chemistry doctoral faculty in other departments at City College:
Philip Barnett (Library), Associate Professor.
Library science: identifying journals most appropriate for specific science
disciplines; optimizing database searching.
Roger Dorsinville (Electrical Engineering), Professor.
Physical: nonlinear optical characterization of organic materials; organic
light emitting diodes.
Morton Denn (Chemical Engineering and Physics), Distinguished
Professor.
Chemical Engineering: Use of rheology, non-Newtonian fluid mechanics
and polymer physics to solve problems in polymer processing, including
extrusion instabilities, liquid crystalline polymers and polymer blends
and interfaces.
Marilyn Gunner (Physics), Associate Professor.
Biophysics: methods of computational analysis which combine molecular
mechanics and continuum electrostatics to analyze electron and protein
transfer in proteins; free energy, temperature and pH dependence of electron
and proton transfers in photosynthetic reaction centers by optical spectroscopy.
Ronald L. Koder (Physics), Assistant Professor.
Molecular Biophysics: Biophysics of proteins; protein design.
David S. Rumschitzki (Chemical Engineering), Professor.
Molecular Biophysics/Chemical Engineering: Early events in atherosclerosis;
mechanism of coking in supported metal catalysts; hydrodynamic stability of interfaces
in two-phase flow; observation of intermediate states of protein folding.
Carol A. Steiner (Chemical Engineering), Professor.
Physical: Surface chemistry; microemulsions.
Pengfei Zhang (Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), Assistant Professor.
Environmental Chemistry: Contaminant hydrology; transport and remediation of
contaminants (chlorinated solvents, heavy metals, and microbes) in the subsurface.