A big congratulations to our undergrads Marty and Laura on their graduation!

Thanks to Prof. Peter Mascher for the invitation to present our work at the ECS conference. It was a good opportunity to present some of Marty and Michael’s recent measurements using SSTA to measure nanocrystal syntheses. It was great to be in Canada again, and learn more about what’s happening in the electrochemistry community.

Thanks to Prof. Aditi Bhattacherjee for hosting my remote visit to the Univeristy of Iowa’s chemistry department. Some really exciting work going on in Iowa, and I can’t wait to see what comes out of Aditi’s lab in the next few years!

Many thanks to Prof. Gordana Dukovic and Prof. David Nesbitt for the invitation to give a seminar at CU Boulder. It was my first seminar travel since before the pandemic, and it was so nice to actually see people face-to-face. Great to hear about all the exciting things going on at Boulder and make some new connections!

Many thanks to Profs. Kallie Willets, Sean Roberts, and Libai Huang for the invitation to present our work at the ACS meeting. It was great to be able to include Marty and Michael’s newest SSTA measurements on perovskite nanocrystals. They did a great job getting those new measurements to happen last quarter!

Big congrats to the squaraine team on the publication of their first peer-reviewed paper in MRS Advances! Our paper, titled “Effect of thermal annealing on aggregation of a squaraine thin film” shows our recent in situ SSTA measurements of squaraines during thermal annealing and the kinetic model we’ve built that explains the changes we observe in the spectra. A big thank you to our collaborators at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Chris Collison and his student Tyler Wiegand.

A warm welcome to Celsey Price and Matt Bingman, our new rotation students this quarter. Celsey will be working with Zach to understand SSTA and measure some squaraine films, while Matt will work with Michael and Marty to synthesize some perovskite nanocrystals and learn to measure them using SSTA. We’re all looking forward to an exciting quarter!

Many thanks to Bern Kohler, Taiha Joo, Jennifer Ogilvie, Jinquan Chen, and Mahesh Hariharan for organizing the Frontiers in Ultrafast Spectroscopy of Photoexcited States symposium at Pacifichem this year, and for the invitation to participate. It was great to have a chance to share James’ work using SSTA to understand the surfaces of perovskite NCs during their synthesis.

Many thanks to Wei Zhao, Minhaeng Cho, Junrong Zheng, and Jeff Davis for organizing the Recent Advances in Coherent Multidimensional Spectroscopy symposium at Pacifichem this year, and for the invitation to share our work. It was great to have a chance to tell people about Zach, Laura, and Aine’s recent work studying the thermal annealing of squaraine films.

We wish James all the best as he makes his way up to Seattle to start a postdoc position in David Ginger’s group! James pioneered the synthesis and measurement of perovskite nanocrystals in our group, and also made huge contributions to our educational mission by developing a series of microscopy laboratories for our undergraduates. We will miss his unique personality, and already have noticed way less camo in our lives. Good luck James!