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Despite the moderate size of Hope’s student body, the department includes 16 research-active faculty and graduates an average of 40 chemistry majors per year. The ACS-accredited department offers both BA and BS degrees in chemistry, a biochemistry and molecular biology major (joint with the Department of Biology and accredited by the ASBMB), an interdisciplinary neuroscience major, and a chemistry concentration within the interdisciplinary environmental science major.

Teaching and Research

Undergraduate education through excellent classroom teaching with appropriate modern pedagogies integrated with authentic faculty scholarship with undergraduate student collaborators is a hallmark of our program. Student-faculty collaborative research involves approximately 100 students per year, including 60 who perform research in the department each summer.

The success of the research program is demonstrated by the publication of research results and by the accomplishments of our graduates. Members of the department have published 94 papers since 2014, 67 of which incorporate 235 undergraduate student coauthors. Based on NSF data, 259 Hope graduates have received Ph.D.s in chemistry since 1966, which ranks Hope in the top 1% of all 533 US liberal arts and undergraduate institutions. This production continues into the current decade, as an average of 10 students enter graduate school each year. An average of 13 additional students enter medical or dental schools each year, representing an admissions rate of nearly 85%. Hope students regularly receive national accolades such as NSF-GRP, Goldwater and Fulbright fellowships.

Student-faculty collaborative research is supported generously by departmental and college funds, but the majority of support is obtained from external funding agencies. Since 2014, members of the department have obtained external funding of $1.68 million per year, acquired from the National Science Foundation, the Beckman Foundation, the American Chemical Society, Research Corporation and the Dreyfus Foundation, among others.

The department has received a CUR AURA award for campus-wide undergraduate research accomplishments and the ACS Stan Israel Award for Advancing Diversity in the Chemical Sciences. Current department faculty include three Cottrell Scholars, three Dreyfus Teacher-Scholars, an ACS Fellow, an ASBMB Fellow and two AAAS Fellows. Additionally, faculty have received two James Flack Norris awards for Outstanding Achievement in the Teaching of Chemistry, six NSF CAREER awards, a Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Career and Lifetime Achievement Award, and numerous local and regional awards for teaching, research and mentorship.

The Department of Chemistry is housed in the A. Paul Schaap Science Center, where each faculty member has a private office and an adjoining lab for research. A full time director of laboratories handles purchasing, maintains the chemical stockroom and manages over 50 student employees within the department. The department has a broad range of modern research and teaching instrumentation, as well as endowed funds for instrument maintenance and repair, faculty and student summer support, and a well-funded competitive internal grants program. 

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