HUNTER COLLEGE
Hunter College
695 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10021
Hunter College is located in the heart of Manhattan's cultural center, on Park Avenue at 69th Street. Its central location makes it readily accessible from all parts of the metropolitan area by means of an elaborate system of express trains and buses which operate 24 hours a day. Many students live in the Greenwich Village and Morningside Heights areas and in other parts of Manhattan. Others live in residential areas in one of the other boroughs or across the Hudson River in New Jersey.
The College, founded in 1870, is one of the senior colleges of the City University. The chemistry faculty consists of sixteen members, many of whom have been appointed in the last few years. Faculty, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students and undergraduates are engaged in a variety of projects of current interest in science and chemical education.
The abundance of major equipment in the department provides students with the opportunity to carry out many kinds of chemical investigation. The NMR facility includes a 500 MHz Varian 500 Unity Plus, a JEOL GX-400 400MHz spectrometer and a 300 MHz General Electric QE-300. These instruments can be used for routine determinations as well as multidimensional analysis of complex molecules, and all are equipped with multinuclear probes. A number of UV-visible spectrophotometers are available, as are FT-IR and laser Raman spectrometers and an atomic absorption spectrometer. A Spex fluorescence spectrometer capable of lifetime and steady-state measurements is used to monitor protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid interactions. Molecular structure studies are also supported by UV-visible and infrared circular dichroism spectrometers and by an X-ray crystallography facility which includes state-of-the-art low temperature and area detection capability. Standard gas and high-pressure liquid chromatography instruments are readily accessible, and are backed up by a Hewlett-Packard gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer with direct inlet capability. In addition, there are scintillation counters, centrifuges, cold rooms, and a variety of electrochemical instruments available to researchers in the department.
The department's direct link to the Internet opens all the facilities of that network to users of the many workstations and other computing equipment in our laboratories. The backbone of our facility is the IBM RS/6000 RISCstation, of which there are about a dozen in use. They are augmented by a number of other workstations from Sun and DEC, and graphics systems from Evans and Sutherland and Silicon Graphics. Naturally, there are many Macs and DOS-based PCs available for word processing, spreadsheets, literature searching, etc. An intradepartmental network links these machines, and supports our research efforts in molecular modelling and computational chemistry. The department also has full access to the central computational facility of the City University, powered by several IBM 3090 mainframes.
Electronic and machine shop services maintain the instrumentation in excellent working condition, and are also available for the design and construction of new equipment.
Hunter's close proximity to numerous scientific organizations, institutes,
and universities provides valuable cross-fertilization of ideas in all
areas of research in the physical and life sciences and in medicine. The
New York Academy of Science is just two blocks from Hunter, for example.
Members of the research staff are currently making important contributions
in each of the traditional subdisciplines of chemistry as well as conducting
theoretically and biologically oriented investigations.
Doctoral Faculty and Research Interests
Spiro D. Alexandratos
Professor, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1977
Organic and Polymer Science: Polymer-supported reagents for organic reactions, synthesis of ion exchange resins, purification of water in the environment, separations science.
Joseph J. Dannenberg
Professor, Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, 1967
Theoretical and Organic: Molecular orbital theory studies; solid state interactions; hydrogen bonding; crystal nucleation; organic reactions; free radicals.
Max Diem
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., University of Toledo, 1976
Charles M. Drain
Associate Professor, Ph.D., Tufts University, 1988
Materials Science/Supramolecular Chemistry: Design, synthesis, and characterization of self-assembling photonic materials based on porphyrins and other photoactive molecules linked by various intermolecular interactions; bioorganic chemistry: probing mechanisms of metallo redox enzymes.
Lynn C. Francesconi
Associate Professor, Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1979
Inorganic: Metalloradiopharmaceutical research; technetium chemistry; metals in medicine; lanthanide chemistry.
Richard W. Franck
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Stanford University, 1963
Organic: Synthesis of antibiotics; stereochemistry; carbohydrate chemistry.
Dixie J. Goss
Professor, Ph.D., University of Nebraska, 1975
Biophysical: Fluorescence studies of protein-nucleic acid interactions; ribosome and initiation factor kinetic studies; light scattering and fluorescence studies of associating systems.
Nancy Greenbaum
Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1984
Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics: Determination of RNA structure by multi-dimensional homonuclear and heteronuclear NMR Spectroscophy; role of RNA structural elements; RNA-metal ion and RNA-protein interactions in pre-mRNA splicing reactions.
Klaus Grohmann
Professor, Ph.D., University of Heidelberg, 1965
Organic: Synthesis and investigation of novel theoretically significant molecules: nonclassical semibullvalenes and barbaralanes; sulfur heterocycles; systematic synthesis of organic metals; 13-methylphenalene and its benzo-derivatives.
William E.L. Grossman
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Cornell University, 1964
Analytical: Quantitative Raman spectroscopy; chemical education.
Wayne W. Harding
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of West Indies, 1999
Organic, Biochemistry: Isolation, characterization, synthesis and bioassay of natural products; design, synthesis and evaluation of molecules with CNS activity.
Akira Kawamura
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1999
Bioorganic/Natural Products: Chemical and biological characterization of natural products using spectroscopic and genomic tools.
Frida E. Kleiman
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., National University of Cordoba, Agentina, 1995
Biochemistry and Biophysics: macromolecular assembly of proteins; molecular basis of different cellular responses (DNA damage and heat shock); corelation with control of gene expression and cancer.
Louis Massa
Professor, Ph.D., Georgetown University, 1966
Physical: Quantum mechanical density matrix theory; molecular Hartree-Fock calculations; use of density matrix methods to obtain orbitals from crystal structure data; Hartree-Fock calculations of ion-induced dipole clusters; infrared remote sensing.
Hiroshi Matsui
Associate Professor, Ph.D., Purdue University, 1996
Biomaterials/Nanochemistry: Biological nanotubes self-assembled from peptides/proteins are used as building blocks to fabricate nanometer-scaled electronics, magnetic devices and chemical/biological sensors. Those smart nanotubes use molecular recognition to identify and anchor to desired positions on surfaces. The nanotubes can also mineralize specific metal/semiconductor via molecular recognition to change the physical properties of nanotubes for these applications.
Pamela A. Mills
Professor, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1986
Physical: Computer simulations; ion distributions near polymeric DNA and near oligonucleotides; grand canonical simulations of thermodynamics of ion-DNA-protein solutions.
David R. Mootoo
Professor, Ph.D., University of Maryland, 1986
Organic: Synthesis of complex tetrahydrofurans, polyhydroxy indolizidines, qinolizidines, pyrrolizidine alkaloids and carbohydrate mimetics.
Gary J. Quigley
Professor, Ph.D., State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, 1969
Physical: Structure of nucleic acids, proteins, protein-nucleic acid complexes and drug-nucleic acid complexes; molecular mechanics of biological molecules; X-ray diffraction instrumentation; molecular graphics.
Angelo Santoro
Professor, Ph.D., University of Kansas, 1957
Organic: DTA and DSC of organic reactions; chemistry of guanidine; quanidinium ion derivatives as related to biological activity and Y conjugation (aromaticity).
William V. Sweeney
Professor, Ph.D., University of Iowa, 1973
Physical/Biochemical: Physical studies of iron-sulfur proteins; NMR studies of the epidermal growth factor domain of blood coagulation factor IX; chemical education: cross disciplinary integrated courses.
Maria Tomasz
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1962
Physical/Biochemistry: Chemistry of drug-DNA interactions; relationships between drug-related modification of nucleic acids and their altered function; molecular basis of antitumor activity of mitomycin C; DNA adducts in vivo.
Yujia Xu
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Connecticut, 1995
Biochemistry and biophysics: Folding and supramolecular assembly of proteins; interaction and molecular recognition of macromolecules; molecular etiology of connective tissue diseases.