(Posted 10-7-99)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
News Service Contact: Deborah Durkee, 336-334-5371

UNCG CHEMIST RECEIVES GRANT TO BRING
RESEARCH TO UNDERGRADUATES

GREENSBORO--Dr. Liam M. Duffy, an assistant professor of chemistry at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has been awarded a $20,000 grant to bring sophisticated chemistry research to undergraduates.

Duffy, a physical chemist, was one of 12 awardees selected from 85 nominees to receive grants through the 1999 Camille and Henry Dreyfus Faculty Start-up Grant Program for Undergraduate Institutions. The award is designed to provide external research support to new faculty at the beginning of their first full-time academic appointment.

The award will support Duffy's research in molecular reaction dynamics, which is the detailed study of how molecules react on a quantum mechanical level. Research in this field is usually expensive, requiring lasers and other elaborate machines. As a consequence, few institutions have opportunities for undergraduates to be exposed to such cutting edge research. Duffy will avoid most of those costs by borrowing techniques from physics and applying them to chemistry.

Duffy will employ millimeter wave spectroscopy, the research technique he learned in his post-doctoral research in the Physics Department at Duke University. Undergraduate research assistants will be involved in the experiments. Some practical implications of the research include pollution detection and control, computer chip fabrication and laser design.

Duffy earned his undergraduate degree from Boston University and his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from UNC-Chapel Hill.  He spent four years at Duke University doing post- doctoral research under a National Research Council grant.
 

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