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Department of Chemistry

How can the chemical sciences respond to major societal challenges: in health and bioengineering, for the environment around clean, safe, and efficient energies, for developing quantum technologies and sober, sustainable, and innovative materials? Chemistry is a natural science. From the atom to the microscopic scale, chemistry describes the fundamental interactions between the elements when they assemble and organize themselves to form minerals and living organisms. Chemistry is a science of equilibria for which reaction time and kinetics are essential. Fundamentally empirical, the ideal laws are confronted with the reality of measurement and experience. Victim of a degraded reputation due to the excesses of our society, chemistry reinvents itself and finds itself the figurehead of the necessary evolutions in health, the environment, and energy transition. Because chemistry transforms matter, pollutants, and living matter, it stores energy and influences the life cycle of elements: everything is chemistry.
Confocal microscopy device for studying luminescent nanocrystals with biological applications
The Solid State Chemistry group of the Condensed Matter Physics Laboratory
Electron microscopy image of YVO4 nanocrystals with pores after high-temperature annealing
Glass pane containing quantum dots nanocrystals - Elexei Ekimov
Electron microscopy images of mesoporous silica thin films with ordered arrays of nanoholes
Photocatalytic layer based on TiO2 nanocrystals dispersed in a mesoporous silica matrix
Azobenzene-based sol-gel layers photo-structured by irradiation with light interference
Bragg mirrors obtained by alternating deposition of low-index (mesoporous silica) and high-index (TiO2) layers.
Structure of latrunculin B, a natural marine substance inhibiting the actin cytoskeleton. It is a target for total synthesis.
Ligand-protein interaction models (here cytochalasin D within actin) provide a research basis for creating new drugs or chemical tools for biology.

The Chemistry Department at X offers a human-scale, high-level training program in the chemical sciences. All our academic programs include immersions at the heart of our research center. It's our DNA.