A big thanks to Kelly and Morgan who executed all of the work on SSTA and simulating molecular aggregation that we presented at the virtual ACS meeting this week. Another big thanks to Profs. Shane Ardo and Naomi Ginsberg for the kind invitation and for putting together a great symposium under difficult circumstance.

Congrats to Elijah who gave a terrific final presentation today to finish his REU project. It turns out Elijah really likes quantum mechanics and programming, so he learned how to simulate absorption spectra by constructing a site-based Hamiltonian. Incredibly impressive progress in only six weeks, and great slides, too! Thanks to Prof. Geri Richmond, Priscilla Lewis, and the other folks in MSI who helped keep the REU program running this summer. It was a pleasure to work with you, Elijah, and good luck with your senior year!

We had our socially distanced goodbye picnic for Madi today. We are all so sad to see you go, but super excited that you’ll be having new adventures at MIT! Looking forward to seeing the amazing stuff you’ll accomplish in graduate school. Hope you get some Cool Data. We’ll miss you!

Thank you to Norfolk State University for remotely hosting a terrific panel for your undergraduates on how to apply to graduate school. It was an honor to be invited to join the discussion and have a chance to speak to 130 of your undergraduates. We hope to see some of them at the University of Oregon someday!

We welcome our new REU student Elijah Begin from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas! Elijah will be joining us remotely to learn about our research and perhaps help us out with some data analysis. Looking forward to working with you, Elijah!

A huge congratulations to Kelly and Madi who both had their commencement ceremony! Kelly will be defending his thesis in a few months, and Madi will be leaving us to pursue graduate studies at MIT in a few weeks. Along with her degree, Madi also received the Warner Peticolas Award for excellence in undergraduate research in physical chemistry! Congrats to both Kelly and Madi!

We officially welcome Zach Walbrun to our lab group! His thesis will focus on the evolving charge transfer properties of organic donor-acceptor systems during the thermal annealing of thin films, using both SSTA and simulations. Welcome to the team!

Kelly’s hard work developing SSTA was the subject of a talk at our first-ever remote conference, Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics 2020. While it would have been nice to interact with everyone in person in London, it was still great to get a chance to share Kelly’s work and hear some awesome talks. Many thanks to the organizers who really showed that remote conferences can be pretty amazing! No conference is complete without a conference photo…

Congratulations to James, Michael, and Tim on the publication of their paper, “Surface ligation stage revealed through polarity-dependent fluorescence during perovskite nanocrystal growth” in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C! James discovered that different types of syringe filter media select for nanocrystals with different surface properties. In these studies our team uses filtration and rapid sampling of a reaction mixture to show distinct stages of growth during the synthesis of methylammonium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals. Really neat work, great job team!

A huge congratulations to our undergrad Madi, who was selected for the NSF’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program! We are all so happy for her – hooray!!