Renowned Chemist Heads New Facility

The word among geochemists is that Patrick Hatcher, who joined Old Dominion in January as the Batten Endowed Chair in physical sciences, should be 10 times more famous than he is. That’s how he was described when he received the 2005 Geochemistry Division Medal from the American Chemical Society.

But not many people outside of organic and environmental geochemistry can appreciate his vanguard use of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to define how certain macromolecules look and behave.

Suffice it to say that over the past 15 years, scientists lined up to work with the former Ohio State University researcher on projects requiring chemical analysis of hard-to-analyze compounds.

Hatcher’s creative methods have given science a better understanding of coal, petroleum and natural polymers, of the ways sediment and soil interact with pollutants, and of how natural organic material can thwart the treatment of drinking water.

The new College of Sciences Major Instrumentation Cluster (COSMIC), which Hatcher directs, features a 12-Tesla Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometer that promises to be a monument of sorts to ODU’s increased emphasis on research. It is only the second of its type to be installed at a U.S. university.