Thank you to Prof. Jeongho Kim for the invitation to present our work at their 1st International Symposium on Smart Materials and Process towards Sustainable Future. The Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Inha University was a great place to remotely visit. Thank you for the chance to share our work with all of your students!

A big welcome to our two new rotation students this quarter, Nick D’Antona and Kayd Meldrum. Nick will be working on measuring perovskite nanocrystals during their synthesis, while Kayd will focus on understanding how annealing affects organic films of electron donors and acceptors. We are excited to have them in our lab!

Thanks to Suggy Jang and Chris Bardeen for inviting me to contribute to the fantastic workshop they hosted on the manipulation and application of excitons through the Institute of Theoretical Sciences at CUNY. It has been a great series of workshops and it was an honour to be able to contribute. I presented James’ pioneering work where he utilizes the behavior of excitons to learn about the surface of nanocrystals during their growth. We managed to include some fresh new data as a result of James’ heroic experimental efforts over the past few weeks with the help of Zach, Fischer, and Brandon. Great job, team! A recording of the seminar is available here.

Thanks to Chris Bardeen for inviting me to give a seminar at UC Riverside. Really interesting conversations – some fabulous science being done at Riverside!

A huge congrats to Morgan on her newly published manuscript in J. Chem. Phys.! This paper explains how to model the absorbance spectra of organic molecular aggregates that are a mixture of H- and J-aggregates, and shows the clever method she came up with to fit her simulated spectra to those measured experimentally. This allows her to use simple benchtop in situ absorbance measurements to tell her something about the evolving structure and composition during the aggregation of of organic molecules into thin films. Thanks to Morgan our lab has gone from having no idea how to simulate absorbance spectra to being able to do it for complex aggregate mixtures. Great job, Morgan!!

Kelly’s experiments and Morgan’s simulations were both highlighted at the remote MRS conference this week. Thanks to Brian Collins, Aram Amassian, Eva Hertzig, and Xiaodan Gu who organized the “New Materials Design for Organic Semiconductors Through Multimodel Characterization and Computational Techniques” symposium and for the invitation to give a live keynote presentation. It was a fun symposium with an exciting series of talks!

Congratulations to Dr Kelly Wilson on successfully defending his dissertation! We wish Kelly the best of luck as he moves to Texas to start his postdoc at UT Austin. We will miss you!

We received some great feedback at a presentation at Ultrafast Phenomena on the measurements spearheaded by James with assistance from Kelly and Michael on perovskite nanocrystals during their growth. Thanks to the organizers for putting together an engaging symposium.

Thanks to Wayne State’s Department of Chemistry for a fun remote visit, particularly to my host Aaron Rury and the great crew of students who joined me for lunch!

A big congratulations to James, Kelly, and Michael on the publication of their latest work in a special issue of Frontiers in Chemistry on Integrating Timescales from Molecules Up. Their manuscript, titled “Evolving Stark Effect During Growth of Perovskite Nanocrystals Measured Using Transient Absorption” details how they used SSTA to measure methylammonium lead halide perovskite nanocrystals during their synthesis. The lineshapes that they observe while the nanocrystals are still immature disappear by the time the nanocrystals are fully grown. James was able to fit these lineshapes to a Stark shift caused by trapped carriers on the surface, showing that he can use SSTA to monitor the quality of the nanocrystal surface during their synthesis. Really awesome work!