Jacob Dean

Jacob Dean's expertise is in physical chemistry, specifically molecular spectroscopy. His research focuses on using light to better understand molecular and electronic structure, and also to investigate light-induced photoreactivity and function.

One direction of Dean's research group is exploring molecular design principles found in natural light-harvesting molecules/proteins within biological contexts such as photosynthesis and photoreception. Nature has spent a significant amount of "optimization" time in developing molecules and molecular aggregates which collectively perform a particular function at oftentimes impressively high efficiency. Spectroscopy can be used to understand the key interactions or particular molecular frameworks which give way to that function. These studies have applications in artificial light-harvesting and photoswitching.

Another research direction in Dean's group is laser spectroscopy of cold, isolated molecules in the gas phase at near 2 K temperatures to precisely measure the structure, electronic transitions, and nuclear motion activated by UV light of a molecule of interest. This lab utilizes a mass spectrometer coupled to a supersonic expansion to enable both UV-vis and IR spectroscopy of cold samples while simultaneously measuring the masses of any fragments or dissociation products resulting from excitation.