Facilities and Instrumentation

​The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry occupies 160,000+ sq. ft. in the Hall of Science (HSCI, built in 2011) and the neighboring Molecular and Life Sciences Center (MLSC, opened in 2004).  Teaching and research laboratories are well equipped with multiuser research facilities and house a wide array of state-of-the-art instrumentation used by our faculty and students.  Over $5 million grant awards have provided funding to purchase instrumentation and equipment for chemical, biochemical, and materials science research, funded by the Research Corporation, NSF, NIH and the W. M. Keck Foundation.  Through institutional support and external funding, the Department continues to provide cutting-edge facilities and instrumentation for our students in teaching and research programs.

The following is a broad overview of various instruments in the Department:

  • Spectrophotometers: ultraviolet-visible, fluorescence, infrared, Raman, circular dichroism (CD), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR)
  • Mass spectrometers: Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometer (GC-MS) and Matrix Assisted Laser Desortpion Ionization-Time of Flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometer for proteomics analysis, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers (ICP-MS) for metal analysis
  • Microscopes: electron microscopes (transmission, scanning and scanning-tunneling), fluorescence microscope, surface plasmon resonance microscopy (SPRM) and atomic force microscope (AFM)
  • Chromatography: gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), Fast Protein Liquid Chromatography (FPLC) and ion chromatography, as well as capillary electrophoresis
  • X-ray diffraction: single-crystal and powder diffraction
  • Calorimetry: isothermal titration calorimetry and differential scanning calorimetry
  • Other instruments: dynamic light scattering, liquid scintillation and gamma counters, thermogravimetric analysis, cyclic voltammetry, and cluster and distributed computing resources for biomolecular modeling

In addition, Department faculty and students have access to the instrumentation within the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Physics and Astronomy at CSULB.  This includes the NSF-funded Olympus Fluoview 1000 Confocal laser scanning system mounted on an Olympus IX-81 microscope: a next-generation imaging system designed for high-resolution confocal observation of fixed and live cells, which is open to all qualified users, as well as a fluorescence activated cell sorter (FACS). The Physics & Astronomy Department has a Physical Property Measurement System (PPMS) from Quantum Design with magnetic fields up to 9 Tesla and temperatures from 1.5 K to 400 K and Teslatron system from Oxford Instrument with 14 T magnet and 25 mK option.  

With funding from the W. M. Keck Foundation for the development of a proteomics center, the Institute for Integrated Research in Materials, Environments, and Society (IIRMES) in CSULB fosters a cross-disciplinary approach to scientific research among faculty members and students. It offers a variety of ICP-MS systems, as well as an Applied Biosystems 4800 MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS.

The Department also has full access to the High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) at CSULB, which is equipped with 888 cores distributed over 41 compute nodes connected through InfiniBand for high speed data transfer, and a GPU node with 14336 CUDA cores.  The HPCC system is managed and maintained by the Division of Information Technology at CSULB.