About the Seminar
Light-Responsive Materials for a Sustainable Future: Exploring Optically-Controlled Functional Organic Systems
Light-responsive materials hold immense potential in revolutionizing various fields including solar energy conversion and storage, recyclable catalysis, single-molecule sensing, and reversible nanomaterial assembly. These materials exhibit phase transitions, changes in solubility, and nanoscale mechanical alterations triggered by external stimuli, particularly light, through molecular-level structural changes. While the photo-switching of molecules has primarily been studied in dilute solutions, understanding this process in condensed liquid or solid environments is crucial for successful real-world applications. Currently, there is a lack of fundamental knowledge regarding the interaction between light and molecules in condensed phases, as well as the impact of photomechanical switching on intermolecular interactions.
This presentation aims to elucidate the design principles behind optically-controllable materials that integrate organic photoswitches or solid-state photochromes. Extensive exploration of various photochromic core structures and functional groups has been conducted to gain insights into the structure-property relationship of these stimuli-responsive material systems. Additionally, the talk will introduce the application of photo-controlled materials in solar photon and thermal energy storage as well as sustainable catalysis.
About the Speaker
Grace Han received her PhD in 2015 at MIT, where she worked with Professor Timothy Swager on the development of organic materials for photovoltaics. She then joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT as a postdoctoral associate with Professor Jeffrey Grossman. She is currently an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Brandeis University, and her group’s research focuses on the discovery of molecular photoswitches and photochemistry for applications including the solar energy conversion and storage, optically-controlled catalyst recycling, and light-induced phase transitions. Grace has been awarded several honors during her independent career, including an AFOSR Young Investigator Research Program Award, NSF CAREER award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, ACS WCC Rising Star Award, and ChemComm Emerging Investigator Lectureship Award.