UNT is the fourth-largest university in Texas and the most comprehensive in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex, America's 4th largest and fastest growing metroplex. Of the 35,000+ students enrolled at UNT, about one in four is enrolled at the graduate level, making UNT one of the three largest graduate institutions in Texas. The 426-acre UNT campus is located in Denton, a city of 120,000 people.

The Chemistry Department is consistently named a "superior performing department" in research and teaching at UNT. Department research is supported by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Departments of Energy and Education, U.S. Air Force, the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the Welch Foundation, the American Chemical Society - Petroleum Research Fund, and many other federal and industrial sources.

The research interests of the chemistry faculty span the traditional areas of analytical, inorganic, organic and physical chemistry. Increasingly, however, new frontiers fall at the intersections of two or more of these areas. As a result, interdisciplinary studies are encouraged. Notable areas of strength include top groups in computational chemistry, materials chemistry and chemistry education.

The Chemistry Building (which opened in 2004) is a state-of-the-art 105,000 sq. ft. facility that is aesthetically pleasing, with lots of space for students and faculty to interact both formally and informally. The informal gathering places continue to promote the department's culture of faculty readily accessible to students. It is also a student-friendly space with high-speed and wireless internet connections.

The department maintains an extensive range of modern instrumentation to facilitate sophisticated research, in areas that include chemical synthesis, spectroscopy, computational chemistry, materials and surface science, and chemical analysis. Most of this equipment has been purchased in the past several years and the largest among these are maintained by full-time professional (doctoral level) staff who help design experiments, or teach students how to use the equipment. UNT Chemistry has also an enviable in-house computing facility, ca. 2000 cores and 5Tflops of performance dedicated to computational chemistry.