My interests have spanned a wide range of topics, but a unifying theme of my work is using advanced spectroscopic methods to probe and ultimately manipulate reactivity in chemical physics. I'm broadly interested in merging the topics from my Ph.D. work with the technologies from my postdoc.
Postdoc
I’m currently a JILA Postdoctoral Fellow with Professor Jun Ye at JILA and the University of Colorado, Boulder using vacuum ultraviolet frequency combs for high precision spectroscopy.
Frequency combs are laser light sources composed of many narrow, evenly spaced frequency lines, or 'comb teeth'. The comb-mode spacing and offset can be controlled to very high precision. Frequency combs are a powerful technology that enabled revolutionary technical advances in precision metrology and are used for a wide variety of applications in chemical physics – most often for high precision and high sensitivity measurements of chemical species.​ Our experiment generates frequency combs in the vacuum ultraviolet region using a wavelength tunable Yb-fiber frequency comb in the near-IR and a femtosecond enhancement cavity for high harmonic generation (HHG).
Our team has found the anomalously low transition of the thorium-229 nucleus at ~8.3 eV (~150 nm), which opens up the field of nuclear-based optical clocks. This metastable isomeric excited state has by far the lowest known nuclear transition energy. The long radiative lifetime and small multipolar moments make the state desirable for use as a clock transition. We used direct frequency comb spectroscopy to narrow the uncertainty of the transition by six orders of magnitude with the ultimate goal of building a solid-state nuclear clock. You can read more about our work here, here, and here.
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Graduate School
I completed my Ph.D. in 2022 at the University of Chicago working as an NSF-GRFP fellow with Professor Greg Engel. Our team used two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) to study excited state energy transfer dynamics in photosynthetic systems. Using a new analysis method I developed to disentangle dynamics in nonlinear spectra, we showed that the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) complex from green sulfur bacteria modulates vibronic couplings in its pigments to steer energy through different excitonic pathways when the complex is under different redox conditions. We connected this finding with an oxidative photoprotective mechanism in FMO and thus established a direct link between quantum phenomena (tuning vibronic coupling) and evolutionary biology (photoprotective quenching). We then showed that long-lived coherences (>1 ps) observed in FMO and other photosynthetic organisms also depend on the redox environment. We established a mechanism for vibronically-assisted coherent energy transfer and then reviewed the role of vibronic coupling in Quantum Biology. You can read more about these projects here, here, and here.
Future
In addition to these areas of expertise, I have experience working in other fields including physics education, atmospheric chemistry, genetics, biomedical engineering, and ultracold molecules (see CV).
My long term goal is to apply the technological capabilities in atomic, molecular, and optical (AMO) physics toward questions in physical chemistry – both in the gas phase and condensed phase. The precision measurement and quantum state control capabilities developed by AMO physicists can be applied to many areas in chemistry such as photochemical reactivity, nonadiabatic dynamics, and laser-based control of chemical reactivity. Feel free to contact me for more details.