The Chemistry Department serves both the university and the region as a center for study and research in chemistry. It offers advanced degrees to both full and part-time graduate students with its masters and doctoral programs providing a blend of theoretical and applied chemistry.
The Beeghly Chemistry Building houses 32,000 square feet of laboratories and shops, as well as an animal room, a cold room, and a stockroom. Equipment available for student use includes: spectrometers covering the ultraviolet and visible region, as a well as Fourier transform infrared and fluorescence spectrophotometers, nuclear magnetic resonance; a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer; emission spectroscopes; gas and high-pressure liquid chromatographs; a supercritical fluid chromatograph; light-scattering equipment; a differential scanning calorimeter; an atomic absorption spectrometer; and biochemical facilities.
For current course descriptions and prerequisites, please see the Registrar's Course Descriptions.
For current course schedules, please see the Registrar's University Schedule.
Applicants must have earned a degree equivalent to fulfilling the requirements for a B.S. in Chemistry or Biochemistry with a 3.00 cumulative grade point average (on a 4.00 scale) in chemistry from a college accredited by the American Chemical Society or equivalent. Graduate Record Examination (GRE) scores are required. All applications must be approved by the faculty of the Department of Chemistry.
Three courses from the following:
One course from the following:
The emerging discipline of Environmental Science is playing an increasingly important role both inside and outside academia, in large part owing to the growing list of environmental problems and challenges, both local and global in scale. The Master of Science in Environmental Science at American University provides professional training for working in the complex environmental field. The program of study is multidisciplinary, reflecting an extensive collaboration among academic departments and major teaching units of the university. The science departments of the College of the Arts and Sciences have created an innovative graduate-level environmental science course sequence that bridges many disciplines, and makes these disciplines accessible to graduate students whose academic training is in other subject areas. We have balanced the need for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary training with the need for depth within a discipline. After initial grounding in core courses in environmental science and statistics, students concentrate in either Toxicology, Conservation Biology, or Earth and Atmospheric Science.
