Research and Teaching Interests

Members of the department are currently well funded by the NRF and the University's Research and Publications Committee to support a range of research projects.

Analytical Chemistry:

* Analysis of a variety of environmental materials, with special emphasis on water: leachates from mine dumps and estrogens in drinking water.

* Thermal analysis.

* Gas chromatography/Mass spectrometry.

* Capillary electrophoresis; novel chiral stationary phases.

Inorganic Chemistry:

* Coordination chemistry of transition metals.

Organic Chemistry:

* Natural Products Chemistry: Structure elucidation of compounds isolated from medicinal and poisonous local plants; total synthesis of physiologically active constituents isolated from these plants.

* Synthetic methodology: using the chiral pool in asymmetric synthesis and catalysis.

* Drug design: developing novel lead compounds for pharmaceutical screening.

Theoretical Chemistry:

* Modelling of enzyme-substrate and drug-receptor interactions.

Facilities

The Department of Chemistry has a well-equipped instrumentation laboratory with a modern atomic absorption spectrometer, UV-visible spectrometer, FTIR spectrometer, TGA and DSC, GC/MS and other routine equipment, and has easy access to a 200-MHz NMR spectrometer. The University's library is stocked with a variety of chemical journals, including Current Contents on disk, and has a well functioning interlibrary loans section.