B.S., Miami University
Ph.D., Cornell University
Hello everyone reading this webpage! My name is Scott Gruenbaum, and I have been teaching chemistry at the University of St. Francis since 2015. I am originally from central Ohio, and I earned my Bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics from Miami University (in Ohio, not Florida!). I then went to graduate school at Cornell University in beautiful Ithaca, New York, where I earned a PhD in theoretical / physical chemistry. (Physical chemistry is basically the intersection of physics and chemistry.) I spent three years doing postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before moving to the Chicago area. My wife is an industrial inorganic chemist, and I have a daughter, a son, and a cat.
At USF I teach Foundations of Chemistry (Chem 120), General Chemistry lecture and lab (Chem 121 – 124), Biophysical Chemistry (Chem 450), and Bioanalytical Chemistry (Chem 422). My research interests focus on using computational techniques such as molecular dynamics simulations to study biochemically interesting systems (e.g. protein dynamics, hydration of lipid membranes, the thermodynamics of drug binding to enzymes). I also love plants (I like to garden) and insects (ants, praying mantises), and I’m interested in investigating plant and insect chemistry using analytical techniques such as mass spectrometry.
