Inorganic chemistry is traditionally defined as the chemistry of all elements but carbon. Modern inorganic chemistry encompasses a variety of sub-fields, including:

• Coordination - coordination complexes of transition metals.
• Organometallic - molecules with transition metal-carbon bonds.
• Main group - compounds of elements from Groups 1, 2, and 13-18.
• Materials - molecular and solid-state materials and their physical properties.
• Bioinorganic - transition metals in biological systems.

Research groups at Washington University are active in all of these areas, with projects exploring metalla-aromatic molecules, semiconductor nanowires, magnetic transition metal clusters and solids, optically polarized NMR of semiconductor nanostructures, and iron-containing desaturase enzymes.

CdSe nanowires synthesized in the Buhro Group.