A warm welcome to Megan Yellowtail who is joining the lab to work on our darkfield microscopy project. Despite only being a freshman, Megan already has a lot of experience at UO as a leader and organizer with the SPICE program, inspiring younger students to pursue science and engineering. Megan will be mentored by Racheal and Alyssa. Welcome to the team, Megan!

Congrats to the lab on receiving a grant that will fund our upcoming project to build a next-gen SSTA instrument! Our new instrument will expand the pump-probe time delay range we can measure in a single-shot, and also enable the isolation of signal from domain boundaries in organic thin films. Many thanks to the NSF for continuing to support our research efforts.

We are delighted to welcome Luis Becerril to our lab. Luis is a graduate student at Cinvestav, Mexico’s national research lab. Luis will be teaching us how to make perovskite films using his aerosol-assisted vapor deposition techniques and will work with Laila to measure these films during growth. We are all super excited to work with him for the next few months!

Kudos to Zach and Laila who did a great job representing our lab at ACS in Denver! Zach had an oral and poster presentation of his fantastic work on the squaraines project; a real tour de force of spectroscopy and simulation! Laila presented her intriguing results showing the effect of glass surfaces on perovskite nanocrystal growth. Many thanks to Aine, Alyssa, Dario, and Logan who contributed to the work they presented. Great job, team!

Work from James, Michael, and newer work from Laila and Logan was presented at the Nanocrystals Gordon Conference in Les Diablerets, Switzerland. It was great to see some amazing work from nanocrystal labs from around the world. Thanks to Gordana Dukovic and Efrat Lifshitz for the invitation and for doing all the work to organize such a terrific meeting.

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!