Graduate Research

Only in D.C.

GW Chemistry graduate student from the Voutchkova group using an NMR machine to check the compound of a sample

Because of our location, access and partnerships with the nation’s top think tanks and research laboratories, our graduate students have numerous opportunities to engage in meaningful research. Students collaborate not only with faculty within the Department of Chemistry but are also with colleagues in GW’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences and School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Whatever path our students choose, be it health care, the environment, chemical and nuclear threats, plant biochemistry or clean energy, they delve into the most exciting scientific questions of today.

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Graduate Research in Action

Student uses equipment in the Houston Miller lab

At the Ground Zero of Global Warming

Funded by a $980,000 grant from NASA and other research partners, Chemistry Professor J. Houston Miller and two graduate students spent a summer in Fairbanks, Alaska, studying permafrost. There may be as much as 1,000 billion metric tons of carbon in the permafrost ground — and it’s thawing at an accelerated rate, releasing greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. Miller’s group constructed a device that uses laser sensors to measure gas concentrations at the ground level, a much more accurate method than the alternative, satellite measurements.