Student Resources

Coursework

• Inter-University Doctoral Consortium Form
• Advanced Standing Transfer Credit Application Form

Research

• Research Rotations Form
• Research Mentor Selection Form
• Thesis Committee Recommendation Form
• Thesis Committee Meeting Report
• Second Level Exam Form
• Advancement to Candidacy Form

Doctoral Dissertation Defense

• Human Participants Form
• Instructions for Preparing the Doctoral Dissertation
• Certification of Dissertation by Thesis Committee Members Form
• Report of Final Examination Form
• Approval of Revised Dissertation Form

Other Forms

• Request for Leave of Absence Form
• Request for Withdrawal Form
• Application for Readmission
• Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) Form
• Transcript Request Form
• Revised Governance of the Ph.D. Program in Chemistry (Approved by the Graduate Council on October 31, 2006)

The Advanced Science Research Center (ASRC) at the CUNY Graduate Center is a premier interdisciplinary research institute, purpose-built for scientific discovery and education that transcend traditional boundaries.

The ASRC is designed around its five dynamic research initiatives. Each occupying an entire floor, the initiatives bring together established scientists, ambitious early-career researchers, and students to collaborate on expansive new research yielding practical benefits for society. They pursue fundamental research leading to breakthrough discoveries that in turn influence technology, medicine, environmental management, and more.

Located on the campus of The City College of New York in Harlem, the striking, 200,000-square-foot ASRC building embodies a bold vision for the future of scientific innovation. At the center’s core is a worldclass facility designed to inspire a novel approach to the scientific method itself—one that links talented and ambitious scientists with hundreds of top researchers from the 25 campuses of The City University of New York (CUNY) as well as colleagues within and far beyond New York City.

The unique multi-campus structure of the City University of New York offers graduate students several key advantages in graduate study:  a wide diversity of faculty research interests, an abundance of research equipment and many collaborative opportunities.  One of the major attributes of the Ph.D. Program is that students conducting research at one senior college have access to the facilities and instrumentation at all of the other senior colleges.  Notable recent acquisitions include NMR facilities at several colleges:  Varian Unityplus 600 MHz [Staten Island] and 500 MHz [Hunter] instruments for advanced solution studies of proteins and polymers; Bruker high-field instruments with multinuclear capability [Brooklyn, City, Queens]; and a Varian Unityplus 300 MHz wide-bore instrument for solid state studies [Staten Island]. These systems are linked via ftp data transfer and remote log-in capability through the CUNY central computer system.  Other recent acquisitions include:  a Bruker ESP 380E FT-EPR, HP 1050M and 1090 HPLC systems;  a Dupont 2100 thermal analyzer (DSC,TGA); Applied Biosystems 433A peptide synthesizer; MALDI Mass Spectrometer; Spectra Physics Model 3941-MIS regenerative mode locked, Tsunami Ti-sapphire laser; Shimadeu QP 500 GC Mass Spectrometer; ASAP 2010 physisorption analyzer; X-ray diffractometers equipped for analysis of small and large molecules; and IBM SP2 supercomputer with 10 nodes.  Numerous SUN, SGI and Compaq/DEC workstations are available on the campuses.  Students and faculty have free access to two Linux run computer clusters (instructional and research) at the Graduate Center and to many computational facilities at the senior colleges. Other established research facilities in the program include the CUNY X-ray Crystallography Facility [Hunter] and a laser laboratory plus two cluster beams and two molecular beam epitaxy chambers [City].

The Applied Science Coordinating Institute (ASCI) has been established at The Graduate School in conjunction with CUNY's participation in the Higher Education Applied Technology (HEAT) program of the State of New York.   Many recent equipment acquisitions have been facilitated under the auspices of the HEAT program, which has provided CUNY with $15 million to purchase equipment, and the Graduate Research Initiative (GRI) administered by the New York State Dormitory Authority. Slightly more than one-quarter of the faculty participants in the HEAT program are from the Ph.D. Program in Chemistry; their work is in the areas of applied biomedicine and biotechnology, ultrafast photonics, and environmental science.  Other support from New York State comes from the designation of CUNY as a Center for Advanced Technology (CAT).  CUNY is also one of the institutional members of the New York Structural Biology Center (NYSBC).  The Center, located adjacent to City College, will house the largest and most advanced cluster of high-field research magnets (NMRs) in the United States.  Other sources of institutional support are provided by federal programs such as NMRS, CASI and RCMI.

Each of the senior colleges maintains a library with a wide range of chemistry journals. CUNY faculty and students have access to the ACS online journals. Remote access to journal articles is also available at no cost to doctoral faculty and students at any CUNY campus via two document delivery services, ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) and CAS (Chemical Abstracts Service).  In addition, SIBL, the Science, Industry, and Business Library of New York Public Library is located in the same building as the Graduate Center.  Billed as "A New Library for a New Century," SIBL combines the extensive paper holdings of one of the nation's great libraries with state-of-the-art electronic access. The SIBL research collection comprises 1.5 million volumes, among which is a circulating collection of 80,000 books and an open-shelf reference collection of over 60,000 items.  The Chemist's Club Library and the Engineering Societies Library are nearby.  Library facilities in New York City are among the very best in the United States.

Machine and electronics shops are available at each campus and a master glassblower is available within the university (City) to serve research needs at all campuses.

Although research students spend most of their time on the senior college campuses, regular opportunities to meet graduate students and faculty from all the campuses are afforded by the seminar series held at the Graduate Center.  In addition, each campus has its own department lecture series.  All the other major universities in New York City as well as the New York Academy of Sciences and the New York Section of the American Chemical Society have regular seminar programs.

• New York Structural Biology Center
• New York Academy of Sciences
• New York Local Section of the American Chemical Society
• Brooklyn Secret Science Club

Students have access to The Mina Rees Library at The Graduate Center as well as library facilities at each senior college, which maintain a wide selection of hard copy and electronic versions of science books and journals accessible to CUNY faculty and students.

GC Librarians also curate comprehensive research libguides for a variety of topics associated with doctoral and master's programs

View the Chemistry Research Guide »

The Science, Industry, and Business Library (SIBL) of the New York Public Library is also located within the same building as the Graduate Center. The SIBL research collection comprises 1.5 million volumes.

The Rose K. Rose Dissertation Award is available to Chemistry doctoral students in their last year of studies. Students that apply to the Graduate Center Dissertation Fellowship competition are considered for the Rose K. Rose award and selected by the program’s Executive Officer, in consultation with the Executive Committee.

At The Graduate Center’s 40th anniversary celebration in March 2002, Professor Rose K. Rose was inspired by President Horowitz’s remarks and impressed by the new campus. Rose, who earned a Ph.D. in chemistry from The Graduate Center in 1976, decided to make a gift of two $5,000 scholarships to be awarded over the next two years. Rose continued the gifts over the subsequent years until 2008, when her daughter, Dr. Esther Rose, established an endowment that will allow the Rose Kfar Rose Scholarship to continue in perpetuity, in memory of her mother.

Professor Rose was born in Lvov, Poland and survived the Holocaust as a “Hidden Child”, although most of her family was killed. Prior to being deported, her parents were able to obtain false identity papers and placed her in the care of Krystyna Moskalik, a courageous Polish teacher who lived near Krakow.  Krystyna undertook this dangerous task knowing that “Janka” (aka Rose) was Jewish, but able to pass as Polish.  During the Nazi occupation, Poles were permitted only to attend elementary school. Krystyna and other teachers organized “underground and clandestine” courses, in which Rose participated.

In January 1945, she was liberated by the Soviet army and moved to the city of Krakow to continue her education. A special commission had been established to examine all students in Poland who had studied in secret “underground and clandestine” courses at the high school level. As one of those students Rose passed a grueling (15-day) examination (the so-called Little Matura), covering all subjects studied over the 4 years of high school or Gymnazium. At the same time that the 3-week examination was administered, Rose started attending a Special Program of Accelerated Lyceum Studies for Adults in mathematics and the physical sciences. She completed the 2-year course of study in a little over 12 months!

Rose attended Jagiellonian University in Krakow until she left Poland on June 26, 1946. Between September 1946 and January 1948 Rose lived in Cuba where she attended the American Academy of Commerce, improving her English and learning how to work in an office. On her arrival in New York in January, 1948, she spoke 8 languages and knew stenography, typing, filing, and other useful business skills. She became a secretary by day and enrolled in evening classes at Hunter College. In her last semester, she was finally able to afford to stop working and be a full time student. She met her future husband Alfred (Fred) Rose at a Hunter College dance.

Rose received her BA in Chemistry from Hunter College in 1950, an MS in Organic Chemistry from Purdue University in 1951, and a Ph.D. in Chemistry in 1976 from The Graduate Center. She taught in the Department of Physical Sciences at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY until 1996.

Past Award Winners

2022-23
Meruyert Binayeva
Prof. Mark Biscoe (City College of New York)
“Stereospecific Palladium-Catalyzed Cross-Coupling Reactions of Enantioenriched Tricyclohexyltin Nucleophiles.”

2021-22
Rui Jia
Prof. Michael  Mirkin (Queens College)
“Electrochemical Resistive-Pulse Sensing of Extracellular Vesicles”

2020-21
Nasim Farahmand
Prof. Stephen O'Brien (City College of New York)
Investigation of Potential Multiferroicity in Nanoscale Europium Barium Titanate

2019-20
Ido Levy
Prof. Maria Tamargo (City College of New York)
Growth of III-V Semiconductors on 3D Topological Insulators (TIs) and III-V/TI Multi-layers by Molecular Beam Epitaxy

2018-19
Alex Berkowitz
Prof. Ryan Murelli (Brooklyn College)
New Strategies for Tropolone Synthesis and their Application Towards Chemical Probe Development

2017-18
Frederick Pearsall
Prof. Stephen O'Brien (City College of New York)
Synthesis and Characterization of Multiferroic Nanoparticle Oxides

2016-17
​Niluksha Walalawela Abeykoon
Prof. Alexander Greer (Brooklyn College)
Generation of Reactive Oxygen Species with Multi-compartmented Particles

2015-16
Silvio Panettieri
Prof. George John (City College of New York)
Development of novel naturally-based drugs for the study of inflammation and related molecular phenomena’.

2014-15
Bonnie Kruft
Prof. Andrzej Jarzecki (Brooklyn College)
Computational Studies on the Formation of the Methionine-Tyrosine-Tryptophan Cross-link in the Catalase-Peroxidase KatG.

2013-14
Syed Islam
Prof. John Lombardi (The City College)
Enhancement of Raman Signals from GaAs and CdTe Semiconductors with Coupled Resonances

Philipa Njau
Prof. Michael Green (The City College)

2012-13
Mateusz  Marianski
Prof. Joseph Dannenberg (Hunter College)
Aqueous Solvation of Protein Secondary Structures: Density Functional Theory Study

2011-12
Yixian Wang          
Prof. Michael Mirkin (Queens College)             
Nanoelectrochemical Sensors for Kinetic Measurements and Electroanalytical Chemistry

2010-11
Yuanxi Liao
Prof. Qiao-Sheng Hu (College of Staten Island)   
Development of Highly Efficient Transition Metal-Catalyzed Addition Reactions

2009-10
Jing Jing
Prof. Lynn Francesconi (Hunter College)
Europium Reduction and Lanthanide Coordination in Polyoxometalates

2007-08
Feng Wang
Prof. David Mootoo (Hunter College)
Synthetic and Biological Studies of the Tetrahydrofuran Containing Acetogenins: The Renowned anti-Cancer Natural Products

Ravi Shankar Lankalapalli
Prof. Robert Bittman (Queens College)
Synthesis of Sphingosine Analogs

2006-07
Francois Laforge
Prof. Michael Mirkin (Queens College)
Nanoelectrochemistry of Liquid/Liquid Interfaces and Biomembranes

Xiaohua Li
Prof. David Mootoo (Hunter College)
Total Synthesis of ABCD Ring Segment of Marine Biotoxin Azaspiracid

2005-06
Lingtao Yu
Prof. Hiroshi Matsui (Hunter College)
Synthesis of Inorganic Nanowires by Using Peptide Nanotubes as the Templates via Biologic Recognition

Nuerxiati Nuerjai 
Prof. Hiroshi Matsui (Hunter College)
Biomimetric Bottom-Up Assembly of Nanomaterials and their Applications as Nanoreactors

2004-05
Xuequan Lu
Prof. Robert Bittman (Queens College)
Novel Syntheses of Sphingolipids
 
2003-04
Cheng Zhang
Prof. Lynn Francesconi (Hunter College)
Synthesis, Speciation, and Applications of Lanthanide Polyoxometalates: Versatile Nanostructured Building Blocks

2002-03
Yi He
Prof. David C. Locke (Queens College)
Arsenic Speciation Analysis in Environmental and Food Samples and Investigation of Sulfide in Groundwater

The Graduate Center Offers a variety of financial awards, scholarships, grants, and employment opportunities to help current doctoral students finance their education and research.

Learn more about funding opportunities for current doctoral students »