Welcome to James Commons who will be joining us from Carleton College for a summer REU. James will be working with Alyssa and Racheal to build a new microscope in the lab and do data analysis on images of organic thin films and their domain boundaries. We’re looking forward to a productive summer. Welcome James!

A big welcome to new gradstudents Racheal Fisher and Alyssa Paulson! Racheal and Alyssa will be working with Zach to finish our projects on P3HT and squaraines, and then pushing one of our lab’s new directions, using microscopy and spatial filtering to understand organic domain boundaries. We’re all so excited they’re joining us!

Congratulations to Aine, who graduated today with a degree in Chemistry and minors in both Math and Computer Science! Aine has really pushed forward our squaraines project, was a terrific representative of the group when she presented a poster at the Optica meeting last fall, and will be a co-author on our upcoming paper. Aine will be pursuing a Masters degree in the Knight Campus’ semiconductors program. Congrats, Aine, and we’re going to miss you!

Big congrats to Nick, who graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Chemistry, and was awarded the Richard M. Noyes Physical Chemistry Achievement Award for outstanding achievement in physical chemistry, the Warner Peticolas Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Chemical Research in Physical Chemistry, and the American Institute of Chemists Foundation Award to the Outstanding Senior. What an amazing accomplishment! We wish Nick the best of luck as he pursues graduate studies at the University of California at Irvine. We’ll miss you, Nick!

Many thanks to Suggy Jang and Chris Bardeen for the invitation to speak at the Telluride Science Research Conference on Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Excitons: Bridging the Gap Between Quantum Mechanics and Applications. Zach, Aine, and Alyssa’s work to understand how squaraine molecules behave during thermal annealing was well-received. Thanks for the hard work, team!