REU Site: Columbia University Research Experiences for Undergraduates

This award from the Division of Chemistry (CHE) supports the renewal of a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site at Columbia University for the summers of 2008-2010. The program will be directed by James Valentini with assistance from Virginia Cornish and Ruben Gonzalez, faculty members in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia. This REU site will bring eight NSF funded students to campus for a ten-week period each summer to conduct cutting edge research in chemistry. An additional eight REU students will be supported with institutional funds. Junior, sophomore, and highly qualified freshman undergraduate students will be recruited from across the nation. One of the special advantages that this program can offer to the REU undergraduate research students is the opportunity to participate in research that extends beyond the faculty and resources of the Chemistry Department. Columbia has a Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center and a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, each of which brings together faculty from the Chemistry Department and faculty in Physics and in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Many faculty in the Chemistry Department are principal investigators in the Centers and the REU students in this program will have the opportunity to choose projects that are part of the Centers research efforts. Chemistry REU students can also choose to work with non-Chemistry faculty in the Centers or work in the labs of faculty in the Biological Sciences Department who have extensive collaborations with members of the Chemistry Department. These many interdisciplinary efforts span the frontiers of chemistry research and provide Columbia's REU students unique opportunities.