We are grateful that our recent proposal to the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund was awarded funding! We will be pursuing a project to develop new optical probes to measure asphaltene molecules during their aggregation.

Congratulations to Zach, Aine, and Nick on their successful posters at Optica’s Frontiers in Optics + Laser Science conference in Tacoma this week. A particularly large congrats go to Aine and Nick, who presented at a conference for the first time! Great job to the whole organics team!

A huge congratulations to Michael, James, and Laila for publishing their work on halide segregation in perovskite nanocrystals in J. Phys. Chem. Letters! Michael performed some excruciatingly difficult measurements on perovskite nanocrystals after halide segregation, trapping them in a segregated state and using a traditional transient absorption spectrometer to find that their Auger recombination rates increased. Michael modeled the wavefunctions in nanocrystals as a function of their halide distributions to find that in a NC comprised of both iodides and bromides, the iodides must be segregating to the core of the NC, as opposed to segregating to its surface. This means that it’s likely the strain induced by the exciton that is causing halide segregation, not just individual iodides migrating to the surface – a surprise to all of us! Congrats, Michael!

A warm welcome to Evan Stern and Dario Nunez, new graduate students who will be joining our group for the rest of the summer through the Early Start program and continue on with us through Fall quarter. Stern will be working on understanding copper phthalocynanine aggregation into nanoribbons and their interaction with electron acceptors, while Dario will be doing some experiments to gain insight into how perovskite nanocrystals nucleate and grow. We’re so glad we get a few extra weeks with you this summer – welcome!

Many thanks to the Cinvestav Physics and Nanoscience departments for hosting my visit to the Cinvestav Research Institute in Mexico City. It was great fun to give a lecture to your Advanced Summer School in Physics, and share my research with your Nanoscience department. We are looking forward to fruitful collaborations on perovskite film formation! Afterwards, I bumped into some of the summer school students in front of Mexico City’s center for fine arts, pictured.

A big congrats to Laila and Logan whose poster was chosen as one of the two best at Nanocrystals Northwest this week! They were awarded the opportunity to present their work in a rapidly-prepared oral presentation, and they received excellent feedback! Laila’s hard work leading up to the conference led to a significant advance for the project, assisted by Logan and Peter. Great job, team!

We are excited to work with Peter Carlson this summer, who is joining our REU program from U. Minnesota. Peter will be working with Laila on a project to better understand the mechanism of perovskite nanocrystal growth. We’re all looking forward to working with you, Peter!

A huge congratulations to Zach, who was selected for a Graduate Student Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Chemistry! Zach won the award based on his phenomenal work as a teaching assistant for the physical chemistry laboratory course, where he took on two of the most difficult labs on darkfield microscopy and rovibrational spectroscopy. Thank you for all you do for our undergraduate students, Zach!

Congratulations to Nick, who was awarded the Baitis Undergraduate Fellowship! This fellowship will support Nick’s work on copper phthalocyanine over the summer. Well-deserved, Nick!

A big congrats to Logan on being awarded the Kuntz-Swinehart Memorial Scholarship. Keep up the great work, Logan!