Rider University has received a $119,960 grant from the National Science Foundation to purchase a liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometer (LC/MS), which will be incorporated into several levels of the chemistry and biochemistry curriculum.

“The ultimate goal, besides training our students how to use this sophisticated equipment, is to examine how exposure to this equipment helps students to understand theoretical concepts of chemistry and develop their critical thinking skills,” said Dr. Alexander Grushow, department chair.

In current laboratory curriculum, students are already taught about chromatography and spectroscopy as independent techniques to separate or characterize samples.

“In this project student experience will be expanded by providing students with exposure to state-of-the-art practice instrumentation which will enable them to obtain coupled separation and characterization analysis using a liquid chromatograph/mass spectrometer,” Grushow added.

The department will introduce MS and LC techniques in lower level courses by adapting experiments from the chemical education literature. Upper level students will explore the advantages of coupling these two techniques in a single analysis by adapting standard practices from industrial and academic research laboratories.

Each use of the LC/MS by students will involve a progressively more complex analysis. Before and after each use, students will take a short assessment survey. The result of these surveys will examine perception and understanding differences between students with limited experience on the instrumentation and those with multiple and more complex experiences.

This grant, Grushow said, builds on a previous $183,887 NSF grant the chemistry department obtained in 2000 to purchase a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectrometer (NMR). The use of NMR technology has been an integral part of Rider’s chemistry curriculum for more than 20 years and that grant provided for the purchase of a new, technologically advanced NMR unit.

It also allowed the department to share its NMR facility with Mercer County Community College, Raritan Valley College, Middlesex County Community College and Bucks County Community College. This helps students from community colleges to be better prepared when they transfer to a four-year college.

The new LC/MS equipment will also be shared with these community colleges as the NMR instrumentation.