The School of Chemistry at IISER Thiruvananthapuram has a vibrant academic and research ambience with 16 faculty members, 60 PhD students, 5 research associates, 10 project assistants and 50 BS-MS students who have opted for chemistry as the major. The school also hosts a large number of under-graduate and postgraduate students for short projects. The research activities of the school cover a wide range of areas in chemistry (inorganic, organic, physical and theoretical chemistry).

The department is actively involved in research in the areas of inorganic and organometallic chemistry, synthetic organic chemistry, physical organic chemistry, supramolecular chemistry, DNA nanotechnology, photophysics and photochemistry of nanomaterials and hybrid materials, NMR spectroscopy, theoretical chemistry, computational chemistry and non-linear dynamics. On the experimental front, the department has a large number of state-of-the-art research facilities including 500 & 700 MHz NMR, single crystal X-ray diffractometer, powder X-ray diffractometer, scanning electron microscope, atomic force microscope, absorption spectrometer, emission spectrometer, Raman spectrometer, circular dichroism spectrometer, femtosecond transient absorption and fluorescence, nanosecond transient absorption, picosecond fluorescence, differential scanning calorimetry, thermogravimetric analyzer, DNA and peptide synthesizers, GCMS, LCMS, GPC and HPLC. The computational facilities include 3 clusters with a total of 120 processors.