The Wong Lab

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!

A really nice profile of lab alumna Madi Scott in the latest issue of Oregon Quarterly!

Welcome to our new rotation students Josh Dvorak and Fischer Harvel. Josh will be having fun with polymers and measuring them during thermal annealing. Fischer will be synthesizing some nanocrystals and attempting to explode them with osmotic pressure to make nanoplatelets. It’s going to be a fun quarter in the lab and on Zoom! Thanks for joining us!

A big shout out to James, Michael, and Kelly, whose work was presented at SPIE this week. Their most recent results on using SSTA to monitor the surface quality of perovskite nanocrystals during growth are really exciting and a lot of fun to talk about. Great job, guys!
Many thanks to Dan Congreve, Christian Nielsen, and Andrew Musser for the invite and for organizing a terrific conference.

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!