Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The UBC-Chemistry Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Facility is the only facility on campus that is open to chemistry faculty and students for regular NMR analysis. This facility is critical to the success and training of ca. 250 chemistry trainees at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels along with other members of the UBC research community, local companies and government laboratories. Currently, the facility houses four NMR Bruker spectrometers: AV600cryo, AV400inv, AV400dir and AV300. Existing instrumentation is between 9-15 years old and is beginning to show signs of age with increasing downtime needed for repairs and maintenance. Furthermore, NMR technology has improved significantly since the last upgrade to instrumentation in the facility in 2004.This proposal requests funds to purchase of a state-of-the-art 400 MHz NMR spectrometer which is critically needed to enhance the capacity of our departmental NMR Facility. Chemical research involves the synthesis and characterization of new compositions of matter. Multinuclear NMR spectroscopy is the most powerful and widely used technique use to determine the structure, composition and purity of naturally occurring and synthetic chemicals. Every single student in the collective groups of the co-applicants on this NSERC RTI proposal requires daily access to an NMR spectrometry to permit the characterization of research samples. For each research sample, students will typically record multiple spectra and evaluate many elements (hydrogen-1, carbon-13, phosphorus-31, fluorine-19, etc) thereby requiring considerable instrument time. The current infrastructure in our NMR Facility is simply insufficient to satisfy the demands of ca. 250 users within the groups of a growing department. To maintain our international competitiveness in organic and inorganic chemistry and to continue to attract top research students to our programmes, the UBC-Chemistry NMR Facility must urgently be upgraded with the requested 400 MHz NMR spectrometer.