The Department of Chemistry
The Chemistry Department at the University of Utah made a transition from a small department without a graduate program to a modern comprehensive department as the University of Utah assumed the role of a Research I university during the tenure of Henry Eyring as Dean of the Graduate School. In 1946, a chemistry major was the first PhD candidate to graduate from the university. Since then, the Chemistry Department has grown in stature. The chemistry program at Utah consistently ranks in the upper 10-15% of all graduate programs (182 programs) and in the top 10 of state-funded universities based on federal research & development funding. In the spring of 2022, we had 384 undergraduate majors, 163 graduate students, and 60 postdocs. They also tallied 30,887 credit hours in 2019-2020, which is expected to grow even more over the next 5-10 years. From 2014 to 2021, the department granted 172 Ph.D. degrees.
The Chemistry Department is nationally and internationally recognized for its quality and has been a consistent contributor to the educational and research missions of the University of Utah. Its faculty consists of 32 tenure track faculty members including 9 Distinguished Professors. The extramural research funding exceeded $57M in 2021, with nearly $11M in research expenditures. Most indicators of excellence place the Chemistry Department among the top 30 in the United States.
The faculty at the Chemistry Department are well-recognized locally, nationally, and internationally. Over the past six years they received 21 major awards from professional societies, 12 major awards from private foundations, 8 fellowships of learned societies, numerous local and University awards and 7 University-wide teaching awards. The faculty serves on a variety of national and international advisory committees, editorial advisory boards, as well as reviewers of scholarly publications. The department houses the main editorial offices of the Journal of the American Chemical Society (P. J. Stang, Editor, Member of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences), the Journal of Organic Chemistry (C. D. Poulter, Editor, Fellow of AAAS), Applied Spectroscopy (J. M. Harris, Editor).
