Professors address climate change from multiple disciplines
The panel, during Reunion 2025, was called "Beyond the Apocalypse: New Narratives and Innovations for Climate Action."
Read more
The Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Cornell has been home to some of the world's most distinguished chemists, including four Nobel Prize winners and two MacArthur "Genius" Awards. Our faculty are renowned for their groundbreaking research in many areas, ranging from nanoscale materials and polymers to supramolecular chemistry. Whether you are an undergraduate exploring the discipline or a graduate student working on a Ph.D., you will be able to conduct cutting-edge research with the leading chemists in the field today.
More About Academics
Explore Academic Opportunities
Graduate Program
As a graduate student in Chemistry & Chemical Biology, you will receive training across the chemical sciences while focusing on one of five in-depth programs of study: Analytical, Inorganic, Organic, Physical, or Theoretical. You will conduct advanced research with our distinguished faculty or you can join a laboratory at one of the state-of-the-art research facilities at Cornell, such as the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility (CNF) or Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS)
Nearly all graduate students work as Teaching Assistants in undergraduate Chemistry & Chemical Biology courses in their first year in the program. Admission to the graduate program guarantees at least five years of full financial support as long as you show satisfactory progress toward your Ph.D. degree.
Undergraduate Program
Majoring in Chemistry & Chemical Biology at Cornell will allow you to explore the foundations of the discipline and the fields it intersects with—the Life Sciences, Physics, and Engineering. The undergraduate program will prepare you for a variety of careers in industry, academia, government, and the non-profit sector.
Here are a few of our undergraduate courses:
CCB News
Graduate Student Invited to Prestigious Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting
The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings bring together Nobel Prize recipients and approx. 600 exceptional young scientists from around the world for a week of “interdisciplinary exchange” aimed at fostering scientific collaboration across generations and national boundaries.
Read more
Happy together: Peroxide binds incompatible polymers for recycling
“The dream is, if you can make a really rigid polymer that’s also really tough, then you can make packaging that uses less material, yet has the same sort of properties."
Read more
Moving pictures: Researchers use movies to diagnose EV battery failure
The technique enables them to watch chemistry in action and collect real-time movies showing what happens to energy materials during temperature changes.
Read more
Seventeen Receive Awards Recognizing Inclusive Excellence
Awardees were recognized for the significant impacts they have made to advance access, engagement and belonging through their service and leadership.
Read more
Physicist Brad Ramshaw awarded $2M as Brown Investigator
“This grant will allow us to pursue some high-risk, novel ideas for how to measure material properties like elasticity and high-frequency conductivity that have previously been inaccessible in 2D materials.”
Read more
Abruña receives 2025 Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences
The biennial prize, announced May 15, “recognizes an individual for exceptional and original research in a selected area of chemistry that has advanced the field in a major way.”
Read more
Carbon dioxide key to making a precise polymer safely
Cornell chemists have developed a user-friendly, scalable process for methacrylate that’s precisely controlled and mediated by carbon dioxide.
Read more