Facilities
Facilities
Overview
The chemistry department is located in the Druckenmiller Science Center (completed in 1997) in the Cleaveland Hall wing (the site of the original Chemistry building). This modern faculity also houses the departments of biology and geology, a large central atrium for student-faculty gatherings, as well as classroom and student study spaces. The building is connected to the Hatch Science Library by a skyway.
Instrumentation
The Chemistry Department is well equipped with instrumentation for instruction and research. In the last three years the department has been granted over a million dollars in external funding for advanced instrumentation. This includes a Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionization/Fourier transform mass spectrometer (MALDI/FTMS). Bowdoin is the only undergraduate institution with this type of ultra high resolution mass spectrometer.
Computer Resources
The department has its own laboratory computers (Pentium PC's, and Mac's), as well two Silicon Graphics Indy workstations. There is also a cluster of 1 GHz Pentium III PC's that are available to students for advanced molecular modeling and computational chemistry. Students have access to molecular computation programs (Spartan, Gaussian, Macromodel, ADF), as well as programs for advanced data analysis (Mathematica, SigmaPlot, SpectraCalc). These computers and software packages are important elements of course work and are used extensively in student research projects.