Welcome to the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at The University of Southern Mississippi! Our department will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in the fall of 2009 and returning alumni will have the opportunity to see new major equipment such as our mass spectroscopy core facility and visit with the many new faculty in the department. We approached four million dollars in external funding for the first time this past year, with major funding coming from the Department of Homeland Security, NASA, NSF, and several new NIH grants. Since all of our undergraduate students participate in research, they are benefitting from this surge in research activity. If you are a high school or community college student looking for something beyond the traditional classroom at the university, you will find it here. In addition to research experiences on campus and summer research internships at other US universities, there are many study-abroad opportunities such as our biochemistry exchange program with the University of Exeter (UK) and our new Natural Products Chemistry in the Caribbean course in the Jamaican Studies program.

Incoming graduate students will find diverse and highly interdisciplinary research experiences as well as competitive stipends and health insurance. The department has many cross-departmental research collaborations with colleagues in biological sciences, polymer science, physics, and computing. If you are a prospective graduate student, I invite you to come join us now in this exciting time in the history of the department!

If you are alumnus of the department, you will soon be hearing about planned activities in the fall of 2009 to celebrate our 50th anniversary. I hope you can join us. Anyone with questions should feel free to contact me at robert.bateman@usm.edu.