OUR RESEARCH involves the synthesis of compounds, supramolecular assemblies, nanoscale objects, and electronic materials with unusual ground-and excited-state characteristics and the interrogation of these structures using state-of-the-art transient optical, spectroscopic, photophysical, and electrochemical methods. Over chemical dimensions that span molecules (subgroup 1) to materials (subgroup 2), we probe experimental and theoretical aspects of charge migration reactions and ultrafast electron transfer processes. 

Insights into the structure-property relationships of molecular, nanoscale, and macroscopic materials allow us to fabricate polarizable and hyperpolarizable chromophores, structures for molecular electronics applications, optical limiters, and a wide range of other electrooptic and photonic materials that include novel conducting polymers, structures for solar energy conversion, and new platforms for in vivo optical imaging. Other efforts in our laboratory involve elaborating de novo electron- and energy-transfer proteins, interrogating catalytic redox reactions, designing catalysts for small molecule activation, and developing new tools to manipulate nanoscale structures. Key areas of active research are elaborated upon in some detail in each of the links to the right.

Selected Publications:

  1. Highly conjugated, acetylenyl bridged porphyrins: new models for light-harvesting antenna systems, Science, 1994
  3. Push− Pull Arylethynyl Porphyrins: New Chromophores That Exhibit Large Molecular First-Order Hyperpolarizabilities, JACS, 1996
  4. Singlet and triplet excited states of emissive, conjugated bis (porphyrin) compounds probed by optical and EPR spectroscopic methods, JACS, 2000
  5. Unusual Frequency Dispersion Effects of the Nonlinear Optical Response in Highly Conjugated (Polypyridyl) metal−(Porphinato) zinc (II) Chromophores, JACS, 2002
  6. Helical Wrapping of Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes by Water Soluble Poly(p-phenyleneethynylene), Nano Lett, 2009
  7. Optimizing single-molecule conductivity of conjugated organic oligomers with carbodithioate linkers, JACS, 2010
  8. Extreme electron polaron spatial delocalization in π-conjugated materials, PNAS, 2015
  9. De novo design of a hyperstable non-natural protein–ligand complex with sub-Å accuracy, Nature chemistry, 2017
  10. Quantitative Evaluation of Optical Free Carrier Generation in Semiconducting Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes, JACS, 2018
  11. Printable and recyclable carbon electronics using crystalline nanocellulose dielectrics, Nature Electronics, 2021