UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN River Falls

Opportunities

Hands-on Learning

  • SEM
  • Chemistry class 11042014 kmh 4 (1)
  • labroomwork
  • csh266
  • MRI

Hands-on learning and faculty interaction are important components of our program. Chemistry faculty have breadth of expertise in areas of chemistry such as analytical, biochemistry, computational, education, inorganic, medicinal, organic, pharmacology, physical and polymer chemistry. Students learn in small classes and have the opportunity to work closely with faculty on undergraduate research early in their college careers.

 

Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM)

Scanning Electron Microscope arrival date was December 19, 2022

 

Professors Sam Alvarado in Chemistry and Biotechnology, Lowell McCann in Physics, Tim Lyden in Biology, and Kevin Thaisen in Plant & Earth Science have been developing the project and writing the grant since 2019.

 

Proposal was submitted to the National Science Foundation’s Major Research Instrumentation program in January 2021, which was funded for $300,000 in July 2021.

 

Since then, Professors Alvarado, McCann, Lyden, and Thaisen have been working with the vendor to finalize the specifications and working with Facilities Management to have Centennial Science Hall, room 206A renovation to house the new microscope.

 

The grant proposal was multidisciplinary from the start – we intentionally wanted to include multiple departments and colleges here at UW-River Falls. We want to foster collaboration and cross-disciplinary research at UWRF and beyond.

 

Starting this spring 2023 we will have our first batch of students getting trained to use the instrument through a new SEM special topics course. Having an SEM is a game changer in terms of being able to study matter at the micrometer and nanometer level.

 

Technical details about Scanning Electron Microscope

It is a Hitachi SU-3800 Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). The SEM will have a maximum photograph magnification of 300,000x, and we’ll be able to resolve features as small as 3 nanometers in size. We can determine the elemental composition of a sample using energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and cathodoluminescence (CL). We can also build nanometer-sized electronic devices using electron beam lithography (EBL).

400 MHz Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectrometer