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!

The squaraine project had a well-received debut at the virtual MRS meeting today. Thanks to Zach, Laura, and Aine for their work on the MRS Advances manuscript that accompanied this talk. Many thanks to Profs. Natalie Banerji, Ilaria Bargigia, Carlos Silva, and Mark Wilson for organizing an exciting symposium, and for taking the time to set up a virtual session for those of us who didn’t travel to Boston.

Hooray! A huge congratulations to James on his fantastic talk and successful defense of his Ph.D. thesis! James was one of our first graduate students, and it has been a pleasure to watch him develop into such a fantastic scientist. Here’s Happy James, celebrating his defense!

Thanks to Mississippi State and my host, Prof. Neeraj Rai, for the invitation to visit their Center for Emergent Molecular Optoelectronics. It was great to meet your faculty and see some of the great work being done in your Center. Really exciting stuff!

A big welcome to Logan, a freshman who will be joining our lab to help us learn more about using small-angle x-ray scattering to study nanocrystals. We’re all looking forward to working with you!

Thanks to the University of Geneva and my host, Prof. Taki Adachi, for the invitation to give a seminar in their Department of Chemistry!

It has been a great few years here in Eugene, and it was really fun to be able to present some of the work we’ve done to our community here. It was a rare chance to present our students’ work while they’re sitting there in the audience! Truly grateful for all of the great students I’ve had the chance to work with over the years. I collected all their photos for my acknowledgements slide, and really can’t thank them enough.