The Department of Chemistry

The first intake of students to UWI was in 1948 and they were enrolled for MBBS degrees. The first lecture given to these students was in Chemistry. The second intake, in 1949, included science students and from this group came the first graduates in 1952.
From these beginnings has emerged a vibrant Department with an establishment of 20+ academic staff, 50+ postgraduate students and with an undergraduate population of 750+ students each year.

The Department offers undergraduate courses leading to Majors and Minors in General, Applied and Food Chemistry. The research interests of the staff originally focussed on Natural Products but have since expanded to include a wide variety of topics such as: Reaction Mechanisms, Transition and Lanthanide Chemistry, Bauxite and Alumina processing, Environmental issues, Theoretical and Computational Chemistry, etc.

The first web site in the Caribbean, http://wwwchem.uwimona.edu.jm/ was established in 1994. The aim was to provide information about the Department, in particular about staff and their research, courses and available facilities. The move to a central campus based server, http://www.mona.uwi.edu/chemistry is in progress but in the meantime some of the links from these pages will be to the original Department based server. Since there are over 7000 accessible files, it may take some time for the migration. Hopefully it will be transparent to the reader.

We invite you to explore our site by using the menu links provided.