The Wong Lab

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!!

Congrats to Kelly and Ashley on the publication of their work in Optics Express. Their paper, titled “Broadband single-shot transient absorption spectroscopy”, details the heroic efforts they have made to give our SSTA instrument broadband probe capabilities. From developing a powerful white light source, to programming clever beamshaping algorithms, to meticulously ensuring accurate calibration – this is fantastic work. Great job!

A big welcome to our new research volunteer, Sonja Nusser. Sonja is simultaneously a student at Churchill High School, Lane Community College, and UO since there’s just too much learning to be done! Sonja will be working with Madi, learning how to deposit organic thin films and image them using our homebuilt microscope. Welcome to the team, Sonja!

Thanks to the UW Chemistry Department and my host, Prof. Cody Schlenker, for a great visit. It was fun to share our work with you and hear about all the exciting science happening up in Seattle.