Abstact

Nanomaterials are highly heterogeneous, so single particle techniques with high temporal and spatial resolution can be useful in studying excitation, charge transfer and energy flow mechanisms in these materials. The lecture will discuss techniques with up to 50 fs and 5 Å single particle resolution to study quantum dots, carbon dots, and other nanomaterials. Care must be taken in the synthesis of carbon dots not to confound their optical properties with small molecule byproducts. The talk will conclude by discussing some nanoparticle-protein interactions in vitro and inside living cells. The lecture is mainly experiment-based.

Biography

Martin Gruebele was born in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1964 and lived in Austria and Spain before moving to Berkeley, where he obtained his B.S. in 1984 and his Ph.D. in 1988 at the University of California. He worked on high-resolution spectroscopy of molecular ions and clusters in the group of Richard Saykally. In 1989, he went on to do femtochemistry experiments and theory in the lab of Ahmed Zewail at Caltech and moved to the University of Illinois in 1992 after completing his postdoctoral work. He is currently the James R. Eiszner Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics, Biophysics, and Computational Biology, Professor in the Center for Advanced Studies, and Professor in the Carle-Illinois College of Medicine. He is a Fellow of the American Physical and Biophysical Societies and a recipient of the Sacker International Prize in Biophysics, the ACS Nakanishi Prize, and the Wilhelm Bessel Award, among others. In 2008, he was elected a member of the German National Academy of Sciences, in 2010 a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). From 1998-2005, he served as Senior Editor at the Journal of Physical Chemistry, and from 2013-2017 as Associate Editor of JACS. His research focuses on protein and RNA folding, imaging dynamics in live cells, laser spectroscopy of vibrational energy flow in molecules, the theory of quantum computing and quantum control, and single-molecule absorption spectroscopy detected by scanning tunneling microscopy and glassy dynamics. The work is published in over 290 papers and reviews.