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Welcome to the Roberts Group!

The Roberts group develops new optical techniques to investigate energy transfer, charge transport, and spin dynamics in molecular materials. Current projects include design of hybrid organic:inorganic structures for shifting light's frequency spectrum, development of new optical microscopy methods for tracking excited species in nanoscale domains and at interfaces, and examining materials that allow for strong coupling of molecules to light.

Our Research

Recent News

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April 2021: New work on triplet energy transfer! A new paper from our group looking at triplet energy transfer from Silicon Quantum Dots to Perylene was just accepted by Chemical Science! This paper is the latest in a collaborative project with the Tang and Mangolini groups at UC Riverside focused on designing nanocrystal systems for photon upconversion.

March 2021: Congratulations are in order for Danielle as she has been awarded a 2021 NSF GRFP Fellowship! Awesome work Danielle! 

March 2021: Danny's paper modeling spectral interference in Sum Frequency Generation lineshapes was just published by J. Chem. Phys. Nice work Danny!

February 2021: Welcomes are in order for new undergraduates Eden Chen and Shoshannah Isom! Eden will be working with Danny to compute properties of candidate molecules for singlet fission and Shoshannah will be working with Danielle to synthesize quantum dots. 

January 2021: New postdocs Laura Estergreen and Kelly Wilson join the group! Laura and Kelly will be working jointly with the
Baiz lab to assemble a new transient absorption microscope funded by a MRI grant by the National Science Foundation. Welcome to Texas!

December 2020: New funding! The group receives a seed grant from UT's APX program to work with Michael Cullinan's group in Mechanical Engineering to examine how mechanical deformation of molecular semiconductors can be used to tune their electronic properties.

December 2020: Congrats to Jon who defends his PhD thesis focused on how thin film morphology controls singlet fission. Congrats Dr. Bender!

October 2020: Words of welcome are in order for Yan Li, a first year chemistry graduate student who will join the group this Fall. Yan will be co-supervised by Zachariah Page and will investigate photocatalyst dynamics!

August 2020: The group officially joins the Center for Dynamics and Control of Materials via their seed grant program. This award will support the group's work investigating singlet fission materials for quantum information applications!

August 2020: Congrats to Emily and Danielle! A collaborative paper describing their work with the Page and Yost groups looking at triplet forming dyes for photocatalysis is accepted by JACS. Great work!


May 2020: Danny's paper examining the structure of perylenediimide thin film interfaces using electronic sum frequency generation is accepted by JPCC. Congrats Danny!

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