Professor
Dr. Susan Phillips

    I find this to be a very good question; something that I was asking myself at the end of the recent summer semester.  My previous chemistry experiences in my undergraduate program had me working with NMR and IR graphs or plots, but I will say that this was one area that I relied on my lab partner pretty extensively for the data analysis.  I recognized I was trying to determine the peaks or stretches of different bonds in a molecule, but I did not understand how or why those prints existed.  Although I was a Biology major with a Chemistry minor, my independent research project through college was an inorganic chemistry topic dealing with the synthesis of racemic mixtures of Ruthenium bipyridine.  After three years of synthesis and taxing work with a Kern polarimeter, I only understood that I was trying to identify if different enantiomers rotated the plane of polarized light differently.  I felt that I had only limited knowledge about chiral molecules, enantiomers, and optically active molecules to fully understand the research I was completing.  I was still confused on how a small sample of a ruthenium bipyridine complex suspended in solution could rotate the plane of polarized light when placed in a Kern Polarimeter.  I knew how to work the polarimeter, but I could not, and really still can not explain how it worked.

    At this point, my explanation of Molecular Spectroscopy would be identifying and studying different ways that light (or radiation) can interact with molecules across the entire Electromagnetic Spectrum.  Now what those different ways are or why they are important I can not say for certain.  The usefulness and application of study in Chemistry is it allows Chemists to predict and understand atomic and molecular interactions that occur within molecules.  Molecular Spectroscopy can help identify bond relationships between atoms by experimenting how those atoms react under different energy (light/radiation) conditions.  This in turn can begin to explain complex interactions within and between molecules.  I think...honestly, I just made that up.