Thanks to Suggy Jang and Chris Bardeen for inviting me to contribute to the fantastic workshop they hosted on the manipulation and application of excitons through the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at CUNY. It has been a great series of workshops and it was an honour to be able to contribute. I presented James’ pioneering work where he utilizes the behavior of excitons to learn about the surface of nanocrystals during their growth. We managed to include some fresh new data as a result of James’ heroic experimental efforts over the past few weeks with the help of Zach, Fischer, and Brandon. Great job, team! A recording of the seminar is available here.

Thanks to Chris Bardeen for inviting me to give a seminar at UC Riverside. Really interesting conversations – some fabulous science being done at Riverside!

A huge congrats to Morgan on her newly published manuscript in J. Chem. Phys.! This paper explains how to model the absorbance spectra of organic molecular aggregates that are a mixture of H- and J-aggregates, and shows the clever method she came up with to fit her simulated spectra to those measured experimentally. This allows her to use simple benchtop in situ absorbance measurements to tell her something about the evolving structure and composition during the aggregation of of organic molecules into thin films. Thanks to Morgan our lab has gone from having no idea how to simulate absorbance spectra to being able to do it for complex aggregate mixtures. Great job, Morgan!!