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Environmental Science and Policy Department

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Facilities and Equipment

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Environmental Science students can take advantage of a college-operated riverside laboratory right on the Hudson River. This research and teaching laboratory is equipped for static and flow-through studies using water directly from the Hudson. Other equipment includes river sampling gear, filtration apparatus, and boats for open river and embayment field work. The Environmental Science program also has four Geographic Information System (GIS) units featuring Arc Info and ArcView software. GIS is a computer mapping and database analysis system which is being used extensively in the management of natural resources and the evaluation of policy options.

Our labs in Donnelly Hall contain infrared, FT-infrared, ultraviolet spectrometers, a flame-graphite furnace atomic absorption spectrometer and a 200MHz nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer. We also have a wide selection of chromatography systems, including two GC-Flame Ionization Detectors, a High Performance Liquid Chromatography system with diode array UV detector, a new GC-Electron Capture Detector, and a GC-Mass Spectrometer. This equipment gives us excellent capacity for environmental chemical analyses, and we encourage students to gain hands-on experience with all the instrumentation available in the Department's various courses and research projects.