Message from Eleanor M. Miller,

Dean of UVM’s College of Arts and Sciences

The new academic year is off to a great start with myriad welcoming events for new faculty and students. Because the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) is by far the largest unit of the University of Vermont with 58% of the University’s undergraduates, the characteristics of the entering class in CAS very much influence any overview of the class of 2013 generally. I would thus refer you to President’s Fogel’s warm welcome to the UVM community, in which he describes that class and gives a brief overview of the standing of the University at this point in its long and distinguished history (http://www.uvm.edu/president/?Page=letters/welcomeback_sep09.html). Suffice it to say that the College has never had a class so large, so diverse, and, by all the standard metrics, so talented and civically engaged. Although the cohort of new faculty is not the College’s largest, it is its most diverse and, you will quickly see, if you review the profiles posted on the CAS Homepage (http://www.uvm.edu/artsandsciences/forfaculty/new_faculty/), a very impressive group of scholars.

As I wrote in the last CAS E-News of the 2008-2009 academic year, our intention is to begin to highlight in this outlet the research of College faculty and students in each issue, beginning with the physical science departments. We launched this initiative with a description of the scholarly accomplishments of the Department of Biology (http://www.relationsmith.com/uvm/0809/june09/biology.html). In this issue our focus is the Department of Chemistry. Like the Department of Biology, the activities of the Department of Chemistry include a large teaching component. Its faculty teaches all those students preparing for careers in the life sciences and the physical sciences, and today, those students are very numerous here at UVM and, indeed, across the country. In addition, many students come to UVM to take advantage of its position as a leading institution at which to study various aspects of the environment. Not surprisingly, many of those students, too, end up studying chemistry. At the same time, the Department is also home to graduate programs leading to the M.S. and Ph.D. and, as such, is the site of an array of important and interesting research, supported by an impressive amount of federal, foundation and private funding. I hope you will enjoy reading about the accomplishments of the members of the Department. It is a Department of which I am most proud, one central to the liberal arts mission of the College of Arts and Sciences.