UAF is buying an instrument its accredited chemistry program has gone without

Alaska's only accredited chemistry program has been running without an instrument that accreditation assumes it has. A $249,966 National Institutes of Health grant will buy one.

The system pairs a liquid chromatograph with a mass spectrometer. The first separates a sample into its components; the second identifies and weighs them. It is the standard way to measure trace compounds in tissue, water or sediment, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks does not have one, despite offering the state's only chemistry degree accredited by the American Chemical Society, a status that requires a full range of modern instrumentation.

Eleven faculty are named as users, six of them early in their careers. They come from Biology and Wildlife, Veterinary Medicine, and Chemistry and Biochemistry, along with the Institute of Arctic Biology and the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences.

The instrument will generate preliminary data for the Center for Transformative Research in Metabolism, which the grant abstract describes as the first NIH-supported center in the country to use mammalian hibernation as a biomedical model. It will also be built into six classroom training modules.

The purchase follows a separate award. The National Science Foundation gave UAF's International Arctic Research Center $877,501 over three years for a different mass spectrometer, reducing the need to send samples out of state.