Rensselaer recognizes that the availability of sophisticated, yet reliable, state-of-the-art chemical instrumentation is a necessary ingredient of modern chemical research.

Towards this end the department has obtained sophisticated instrumentation to support a wide variety of graduate research programs. All of these instruments are used by students and faculty in a “hands-on” way. Training is available from experienced faculty and staff and instrumentation is available 24 hours a day.

The department has had a long-standing tradition of obtaining grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other external donors for the acquisition of state-of-the-art instrumentation for scientific research.

The goals of the Major Instrumentation Center (MIC) are:

• to provide access to modern chemical research instrumentation in the chemistry department.
• to provide instruction, guidance and research collaboration with respect to instrumentation contained in the center.
• to provide these services to the chemistry department, the Institute and outside scientific community as resources allow.

Most of the instrumentation (along with operator services) are available on a charge-for-service basis.

The center currently maintains the following Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) instrumentation:

A Varian Unity 500 (500 MHz) FT-NMR spectrometer with variable temperature, multinuclear and two-dimensional capability provide state-of-the-art equipment for solution NMR measurement.

A Varian Unity INOVA 300 (300 MHz) and a Varian GEMINI 2000 (200 MHz) also provide additional solution NMR services.

A Chemagnetics CMX-360 (360 MHz) FT-NMR dedicated to solid state measurements provides capabilities for magic angle spinning, static high power experiments, and multipulse methods such as CRAMPS.