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Yusuf Hamied Department of Chemistry

 

Salters' camp summer students in Department of Chemistry teaching labs summer 2015, courtesy of Nathan Pitt

Chemistry Extension Materials for Schools and Colleges

What is Chemistry?

Everything you hear, see, smell, taste and touch involves chemistry and chemicals (matter).  And hearing, seeing, tasting and touching all involve intricate series of chemical reactions and interactions in your body.  With such an enormous range of topics, it is essential to know about chemistry at some level to understand the world around us. 

Traditionally, Chemistry breaks down into four main areas:

  • Organic 
  • Inorganic 
  • Physical
  • Theoretical

These days there is a lot of overlap between these areas, which promotes new discoveries and broadens the horizons of what is possible: for example, materials and biological chemistry are now two research areas where chemistry in all the different original four disciplines may be put to use.

HE+ project materials about Chemistry

If you want to read up on some advanced Chemistry material, we have worked with the HE+ project to provide materials, written by University of Cambridge academics (including our PhD students and postdoctoral researchers), to help extend your knowledge in several different subject areas.  You can see these either through the links below or on the Chemistry section of the HE+ website.

Some of the information above is adapted from the American Chemical Society web pages.