Want to change research focus to an subject that my program lacks.

First year Chemistry PhD student. So, far in my graduate career I have been doing a lot of biochemistry/chemical biology research which doesn't interest me at all. What I'm really interested in is doing computational chemistry/biochem, it's an area that's really lacking at our school, a big complaint among a lot of the professors, and I think there's a lot of opportunity for me to fill that gap in our program.

That's kinda the problem though, there aren't any professors who really do computational work, and we don't have any of the programs or equipment computational researchers use.

I joined my current group based on some of their recent publications that included computational work, but they've kinda left that to collaborators since coming to my school. Our program going through a lot of turnover (old professors leaving, new ones coming in) and there has been talk of bring in a computational chemist, but this could be in 1-2 years which might be too late for me.

I'm not sure what my option are. One of the ideas I've had is asking my PI if I could do like a study abroad and go work with his collaborator.