Chemical Physics

Beneath the surface of things is a world a billion times smaller than we are, one that many say holds the secrets to everything. Chemical physics is a sub-discipline of both chemistry and physics, where research applies physical methods and theories to study properties of chemical systems. Chemical physics plays a part in countless industries, and your education in chemical physics brings great opportunities both in and outside the lab. You're using physics to study chemistry, or you're using, you're doing a lot of chemistry and you're really focusing on the chemicals, the molecules, the materials, the reactions, the structures, utilizing physics, physics theory, but also physics instrumentation. It provides a unique insight into the chemistry and into the physics of a certain process. It relates to chemical engineering in the way that in chemical engineering reactions are incredibly important, and the way that chemical reactions occur, some aspects of it we are very familiar with, and some we're not. We don't really know how the molecules interact in such ways to produce what we see. Because you're actually looking at an atomic level, or even a subatomic level in some cases, and you're seeing the physics, so you start looking at the quantum mechanics of how those atoms are actually working. There's a certain rigor to doing, sort of, to studying sciences, whether it's chemistry, or physics, or mathematics. There's a rigor there to, you know, starting with a problem, working through the problem, coming up with the definite solution. So quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, kinetic theories will allow chemists who are used to work with large systems to better understand the basic elements of how those systems work. Careers in the sciences continue to grow each and every year. As part of your education, a focus on chemical physics leads you to a huge array of positions in a growing list of industries. The multidisciplinary nature of chemical physics allows you to find jobs in research, engineering, electronics, biotechnology, and pharmaceutical, just to name a few. So for example, one of the things that I work on is trying to find a replacement for the silicon transistor. And then our job is to really design experiments, execute experiments, and then analyze the data. And then based on that, we sort of, you know, keep the research project moving forward. Where we're looking at developing thin films, particularly for drug delivery applications. So these thin films are akin to Listerine strips, or they make caffeine strips, for delivery of drugs in a different way than a pill or a patch. I focus on the nanoscale, and the reason we look at things in such a small detailed scale is that we can get new phenomena out of the material and new properties out of the material when we scale it down. I work on hydrogen storage materials, and with these materials, once we heat them up, we want the hydrogen as a gas so that we can use that as a fuel in fuel cells to generate electricity. I have, you know, interests in biophysical chemistry, where I'm interested in studying, you know, using physical chemistry to study biomolecules and the structures and abilities of biomolecules like proteins. And the idea there is if we understand proteins and how they interact with ionic liquids and how they're stabilized or destabilized by ionic liquids, we can design ionic liquid type systems and solvents and co-solvents for protein applications in biomedicine and biochemistry. What I do is I determine the three-dimensional structure of proteins. You purify protein to high purity, and then you concentrate it at a very high concentration. You then crystallize it. You try to get it into a crystal form, and then we take those crystals and freeze them and put them in the diffractometer. So some of the work that I've been doing has been working at looking at diseases in different ways. So how do we look at them not from a, this is what this disease does, but how does disease play out and what does it affect as a whole? Applying those principles of chemistry and physics and medicine, biology, and all of those things as well. So with a chemical engineering background, you could end up in industry, in private industry, working in a chemical plant. You could end up working in a scientific lab. You could work for the government in a job like I do, providing assurance work. You could work as a quality engineer. You could work as an industrial engineer. We have some of the world's or the country's best national labs. There's a lot of fine universities, of course. There's a lot of biotechnology. Tissue engineering labs and companies doing tissue engineering as well. Some doing materials characterization. I have friends in the petrochemical industries, people who work for ExxonMobil and Texaco. I think that this is the real value of physical chemistry because as a physical chemist, you get training in instrumentation. You get training in different types of instrumentation. You get training in understanding about molecules, everything from proteins down to small molecules, inorganic chemistry, hydrogen generation, kind of the broad spectrum there. There are all these different things that may be possible. Can we figure out what they are and how they work and how can we use that to do something new and exciting and helpful?