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Panel 14 – chemistry
2. Physical and Theoretical Chemistry: Divisions of Physical Chemistry
1, Theoretical Chemistry, and Chemical Physics.
3. Biotechnology: Divisions of Biotechnology, Applied Microbiology,
and Pure and Applied Biochemistry.
4. Center for Molecular Protein Science: Divisions of Biophysical
Chemistry, Molecular Biophysics, and Biochemistry, as well as one
group from Analytical Chemistry.
Partly for historically reasons, the structure of the Chemistry Department
is complex since chemistry is done both at the faculty of science and
that of engineering. This has led to a large number of groups and some
duplications in teaching and research. Clearly, it is essential that these
activities are now combined and first measures have been undertaken to
concentrate and to optimize the respective activities. Currently, 12 units
are defined according to the web page, 9 research areas are given as the
most successful ones according to the science reported, and the 4 large
units enumerated above are planned for the future.
Even though the Department of Chemistry at Lund University (KILU) is
a very large one (with more than 100 faculty members), the Panel has the
impression that certain important areas of chemistry are not encompassed
in any of the given structures.
The “basic chemistry” unit is not a research direction and as it is currently
constructed (as seen by the people assigned to it), it will remain
an agglomeration of all those people who do not fit neatly into the other
three units! We do not believe that this is in the long-term interests of
chemistry at Lund. Organic and inorganic chemistry are major fields
of chemistry and they are the basis for nearly all other activities. They
cannot be reduced to a part which, it seems, in future will cover just basic
teaching requirements. This seems to us to be very unusual in such a large
chemistry department with more than 50 professors and a total of 109
academic staff.
In general, the KILU has a strong bias towards biology and biotechnology,
as well as in understanding basic chemical processes. The tendency
may be rather too strong and one has to make sure that competence
in classical chemistry (e.g. organic, inorganic and material chemistry)
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