Student Hosted Colloquia Kick-Off: Professor Hemamala Karunadasa

Hemamala Karunadasa
Date
Tue October 4th 2022, 3:00 - 4:00pm
Location
Sapp Center Auditorium

"The Molecular Chemistry of Extended Solids"

Host: Camille Williams

About the Seminar

My group is invested in gaining synthetic control over ionic solids. We aim to improve technologically important materials as well as to design new materials with unprecedented properties. To bring the synthetic design rules common to molecular chemistry to more extended structures, we study the physical and electronic effects of changing an ionic solid’s composition, connectivity, and dimensionality. I will share our current understanding of members of the halide perovskite family, whose technologically relevant properties are highly amenable to synthetic design. I will also introduce new architectures discovered in our lab, which allow us to mix dimensionality and increase the complexity of the metal and ligand composition. We recently reported a synthetic strategy for the self-assembly of layered heterostructures into single crystals, with organic molecules directing the assembly. I will present various layered heterostructures that form as an interleaving of perovskite slabs with a different inorganic slab and describe the electronic and optical phenomena that occur where two different layers meet.

About the Speaker

Hema Karunadasa is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University, a Faculty Scientist at the SLAC National Lab., and the Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. She obtained her A.B. from Princeton University and her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. She is an associate editor for Chemical Science.