QUEENS COLLEGE
Queens College
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, N.Y. 11367
Queens College, founded in 1937, occupies a 76-acre, grass-covered campus in a quiet residential area of the borough of Queens. Housing and shopping areas in Queens are within walking distance or a short bus ride, and the Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan is readily accessible by public transportation. The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is housed primarily in Remsen Hall, a four-story laboratory and classroom building and also occupies several research laboratories and offices in the adjacent Science Building. Construction begins in 2006 on an annex to Remsen that will house all instructional laboratories and most organic research labs, and renovations on Remsen will be started to house physical, bioorganic, and biochemistry research labs.
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is well supplied with modern equipment for support of research. For instance, major items primarily used by the organic groups include a Bruker DPX 400 MHz FT NMR with automatic sample changer, a Vacuum Atmosphere inert atmosphere glove box for organometallic and organophosphorus research, a microwave-assisted reaction system, various gas and liquid chromatographs, analytical spectrophotometers, and an HP GC/MS; major items used by the materials groups include a Thermolyne Model 1500 Programmable Oven and Blue M high temperature tube furnaces with spray deposition facility, a photo resist spinner, a Tousimis super critical extractor, a computerized absorption spectrophotometer for solution, solid and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy, a Spex emission spectrophotometer, single photon counting and red-sensitive Hamamatsu PMTs, an IBM-Bruker EPR equipped for in situ photolyses, Perkin-Elmer TGA, DSC and TMA, Micrometrics automated BET with micropore analysis option, Digital Nanoscope III AFM/STM, Hitachi scanning electron microscope, JEOL Transmission Electron Microscope, Atomika secondary ion mass spectrometer with simultaneous Auger capabilities, and a Neocera pulsed laser deposition/ablation system equipped with a Lambda Physik LPX 305iF excimer laser; major items used by the physical groups also include nanosecond pulsed Nd-YAG laser and dye laser systems as well as assorted flash photolysis laser equipment and accessories; several faculty in the department also use various beamlines at the National Sychrotron Light Source at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the biochemical and biophysical equipment includes an OLIS DSM 10 uv/vis CD spectrophotometer, a Microcal isothermal titration calorimeter, a Kibron microtrough monolayer apparatus, an ABS oligonucleotide synthesizer; ultracentrifuges; pulsed field, 2-D, and capillary electrophoresis; Packard 2000CA Liquid Scintillation Counter; cold rooms; sterilizers; and incubator rooms. Computer facilities are excellent, including departmental computers for molecular modeling, and the entire campus has wireless access. Departmental support staff include a full-time electronics technician and an NMR facility manager. A well- equipped machine shop with full-time machinists is available to faculty and graduate students in the science division.
See the Departmental web site for further details at
http://qcpages.qc.edu/Chemistry/ and note
that the biochemistry faculty in the department are not all listed on this Graduate Center
Chemistry Ph.D. program web site.
Doctoral Faculty and Research Interests
Arthur D. Baker
Professor, Ph.D., University of London, 1968
Organic and Bioinorganic: Heterocycles and their metal complexes; applications to DNA binding studies; photochemical, photophysical, and redox properties.
Email: arthur.baker@qc.cuny.edu
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/Chemistry/adb.htm
Robert Bittman
Distinguished Professor, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, 1965
Bioorganic: development of new methods for chemical synthesis of glycerolipids, sphingolipids, and sterols; synthesis and analysis of mechanism of action of antitumor ether lipids; study of role of sphingolipids and lysophospholipids in membranes.
Email: robert.bittman@qc.cuny.edu
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~bittman
Raymond L. Disch
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Harvard University, 1959
Physical: Electric, magnetic and optical studies of molecular structure; computational chemistry.
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/Chemistry/rld.htm
Robert Engel
Professor, Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University, 1966
Organic: Synthesis of phosphonate and phosphinate isosteric analogues of natural organic phosphates; synthesis and investigation of ionic dendrimers; new synthesis of carbon-phosphorus bonds; mechanisms of organophosphorus reactions; synthesis of organic polycations; preparation and investigation of ionic liquids; generation of antimicrobial surfaces bearing ionic components.
Email: robert.engel@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~rengel/Research
Cherice Evans
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Louisiana State University, 2001
Physical/Chemical Physics: Molecular and atomic spectroscopy; field ionization and photoabsorption of molecular Rydberg states in dense gases and simple fluids; nonlinear dynamics; solution techniques for two-dimensional dynamical systems; oscillatory absorption and fluorescence in gas-phase and liquid-phase chemical systems; laser spectroscopy of atomic and molecular Rydberg states.
Email: cherice.evans@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~cevans
Harry D. Gafney
Professor, Ph.D., Wayne State University, 1970
Inorganic: Photophysical and photochemical processes of coordination compounds in fluid media and adsorbed to transparent porus glass matrices; studies of photoinduced electron transfer, photoinduced acid-base chemistry of coordination complexes, photocatalysis, and photopatterning of refractive index gradients in glass.
Email: harry.gafney@qc.cuny.edu
http://forbin.qc.cuny.edu/~hgafney/index.html
William H. Hersh
Professor, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1980
Organic and Organometallic: Chiral phosphorus compounds for chiral phosphorothioate antisense oligonucleotides, rhodium-catalyzed hydroformylation, and catalysis of asymmetric Diels-Alder reactions by chiral tungsten nitrosyl Lewis acids; mechanisms of reaction of heterodinuclear transition metal carbyne complexes.
Email: william.hersh@qc.cuny.edu
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~whersh
Seogjoo Jang
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999
Theoretical Physical Chemistry: Theoretical understanding and modeling of energy and charge transfer reactions in various condensed phase chemical and biological processes. Of particular interest are natural photosynthetic light harvesting complexes and organic nanoscale molecules that have potential applications for the development of new optoelectronic devices.
Email: seogjoo.jang@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~sjjang
Gerald W. Koeppl
Professor, Ph.D., Illinois Institute of Technology, 1969
Physical: Theory of molecular rate processes; classical and semiclassical mechanical trajectory studies of chemical reaction dynamics; application of a general classical variational theory of reaction rates to characterize the dynamical stereochemistry of chemical reactions.
Email: gkoeppl@gc.cuny.edu
http://forbin.qc.cuny.edu/~gkoqc/gwk.html
Sanjai Kumar
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Wesleyan University, 2002
Biochemistry and Bioorganic: Design and synthesis of inhibitors and sensors of therapeutically important enzyme targets; structure-based inhibitor optimization; enzyme kinetics; enzyme mechanism.
Email: sanjai.kumar@qc.cuny.edu
David C. Locke
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Kansas State University, 1965
Jianbo Liu
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., Tsinghua University, PRC, 1997
Physical, Analytical: Adapting and using spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy, and ion-molecule reaction techniques to probe biologically relevant processes; computational chemistry; nanomaterials.
Email: Jianbo.liu@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~jliu/Liu_page/Liu_main.htm
Michael V. Mirkin
Professor, Ph.D., Kazakh State University, 1986
Electrochemistry/Physical/Analytical: Physical electrochemistry and electroanalytical chemistry including chemical kinetics; charge transfer at the solid/liquid and liquid/liquid interfaces; electronically conductive and redox polymers; biosensors; electrochemical systems approaching molecular dimensions.
Email: michael.mirkin@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~mirkinlan/mvm.html
Rajeev Srinivas Muthyala
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., University of Hawaii, 1998
Organic/Bioorganic: Design and synthesis of foldamers; Transition metal catalysed C-N bond forming reactions; Design and synthesis of bifunctional estrogens for targeted photochemotherapy; Development of chromogenic receptors for sensing environmental pollutants.
Email: rajeev.muthyala@qc.cuny.edu
http://chem.qc.cuny.edu/~rmuthyala
Uri Samuni
Assistant Professor, Ph.D., The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998
Biophysical: Resonance Raman and surface enhanced Raman Spectroscopy; sol-gel encapsulation of proteins; development of nanogels and biomolecules encapusulated nanogels and their applications in imaging and drug delivery; photonics and nanobiophotonics applications.
Email: uri.samuni@qc.cuny.edu
Jerome M. Schulman
Professor Emeritus, Ph.D., Columbia University, 1964
Physical: Applications of ab initio molecular orbital theory to molecular structure and energetics; the design and synthesis of cholinergic neurotransmitters; perturbation theory of atoms and molecules.
Email: jerome.schulman@qc.cuny.edu
http://qcpages.qc.cuny.edu/~schulman/jms.htm
Thomas C. Strekas
Professor, Ph.D., Princeton University, 1973
Inorganic and Biochemistry: Spectroscopic studies of the interactions of tris-diimine complexes of Ru(II) and other metals with DNA, including enantiomeric specificity of binding and utilization of complexes as cleavage agents for DNA.
Email: thomas.strekas@qc.cuny.edu
http://forbin.qc.cuny.edu/~tcsqc/tcs.htm