10th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 2 of 2): Professor Robert J. Silbey
About the Seminar:
"Forster Resonance Energy Transfer: A New Look"
One of the most common spectroscopic methods in chemistry and biology is Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), in which an electronically excited molecule (the donor) transfers its excitation to an acceptor. Because the rate of this process depends strongly on the distance between donor and acceptor, this has become the technique of choice for measuring distances in the 20 to 100 Angstrom range for biological systems. The original theory was designed for a single small donor molecule and many acceptors and an equilibrium situation. Recent applications of the technique to larger systems (such as aggregates) and to non-equilibrium situations suggest that a new look at the underpinnings of the model is necessary.
About the Speaker:
Robert James Silbey is the Class of '42 Professor of Chemistry and the Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Silbey received his Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1965 from the University of Chicago working with Professor Stuart Rice. After a postdoctoral year at the University of Wisconsin's Theoretical Chemistry Institute working with Professor Joseph O. Hirschfelder, he joined the chemistry faculty of M.I.T., where he has remained since.
His research, in theoretical chemistry, has been closely coupled to experimentalists. Over his career, he has worked on energy and electron transfer in condesned phases, energy transfer from excited molecules to surfaces, electronic states and optical phases, energy transfer from excited molecules to surfaces, electronic states and optical properties of conjugated polymers, including the manner in which these properties of conjugated moleucles, the quantum dynamics of tunneling systems interacting with their environment, the understanding of the optical properties of molecules in low temperature solids and gases (e.g. understanding hole burning, photon echo and single molecule spectroscopies) and the quantum dynamics of highly excited molecules.
In the last few years, he has worked closely with experimentalists in order to undrestand the experimental optical spectrum of molecules in disordered hosts, in terms of the static and dynamic interactions of the molecule with the surroundings. For example, he and his coworkers have shown that the theory of the thermal properties of low temperature gases can be used to understand the experimental results of hole burning spectroscpy, photon echo spectroscopy, and single molecule spectroscopy at low temperatures.
He is the co-author (with his colleague, Robert Alberty) of a physical chemistry textbook that is about to go into its fourth edition. He served as Head of the MIT Department of Chemistry for five years, Director of MIT's Center for Materials Science and Engineering for three years, and is in his fifth year as Dean of the School of Science.
He has been a visiting Professor at the Universities Paris, Grenoble, and Mons. In 1997, he was the Kramers Professor in Physics at the University of Utrecht. He has been the Kohler lecturer at the University of California, Riverside, Davidson lecturer at the University of Kansas, Noyes-Mobay lecturer at the University of Rochester, Emil Warburg lecturer at the University of Bayreuth in Germany, and Sackler lecturer at the Universsity of Tel-Aviv. He received the Max Planck Research Award of A. von Homboldt Foundation in 1992. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Physical Society.