The Department of Chemistry at Johns Hopkins University is made up of internationally recognized faculty involved in all areas of contemporary chemical science, including many interdisciplinary areas that combine chemistry with biology, medicine, physics, and materials.

Faculty Research Highlights
Explore the department’s most current findings

Townsend Research Lab

Pulmonary disease caused by Mycobacteriodes abscessus has outpaced tuberculosis in the U.S., with cure rates below 50 percent. This sparked collaboration between the Townsend Research Lab and two School of Medicine research groups to design and synthesize a promising new antibiotic for treatment.

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The Bowen Group

The Bowen Group realized highly selective C-H bond activation in methane by single platinum atomic anions.

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The Thoi Group

The Thoi Group‘s new work reveals novel post-synthetic modification strategy leads to improved electrochemical performance in Li-S batteries.

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The Goldberg Group

The Goldberg Group shows the first structural evidence of a nonheme FeIII(OH)(Cl) complex, relevant to the intermediate of nonheme halogenases. They also investigated the hydroxylation versus halogenation reactivity of this complex with tertiary carbon radicals.

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Hernandez Research Lab

The Hernandez Group has joined a cross-disciplinary team in response to NSF’s “Harvesting the Data Revolution” Initiative to propose and develop autonomous computing materials capable of keeping pace with Moore’s law as conventional silicon is outpaced. This perspective is now available on ACS Nano.

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McQueen Lab

This project seeks to answer what new materials advances are possible through the convergence of the materials chemistry and AI/ML fields based on community input gathered in multiple stages, culminating in a pair of forums in January and March 2022. The community identified significant societal benefits from the convergence of materials with AI/ML, particularly in the ability to advance predictability of synthetic reactions and to enable preparation of materials not possible without automated control, leading to advancing materials research and fundamental knowledge, and scholarship, with applications to energy, health care, infrastructure and communications, manufacturing, and space technology and exploration.

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The Fried Group

The Fried Group discovered that roughly one half of the proteins in E. coli are non-refoldable, meaning that once they are denatured, they cannot navigate back to their native states. This calls into question Anfinsen’s hypothesis that thermodynamics is the sole determinant of proteins’ native structures.

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