The Engel Group at The University of Chicago

Our Science...

Femtosecond Laser Laboratory

Our corner of campus

Photosynthetic Growth Chamber

Light Sensitive Laboratory

Femtosecond Laser Laboratory

The Engel Group strives to exploit femtosecond dynamics to steer and to control excited state reactivity. We use a combination of ultrafast spectroscopy, theory, synthesis, and biophysics to approach this problem.

Revealing Nature's Designs

Nature has had 2.4 billion years to evolve and engineer excited state dynamics. From photosynthesis to vision to photoenzymes, we examine natural mechanisms to steer excited states. Our goal is to isolate and identify new design principles to control quantum dynamics.

Steering Excited State Dynamics

Electronic excited states carry enough energy to make and break chemical bonds. Photochemistry operates outside the Born-Oppenheimer regime -- thereby escaping our standard chemical intuition. We seek new strategies to steer excited states and to control their reactivity.

Seeing the Unseen

You can't engineer what you can't see. We build new spectroscopic tools to probe femtosecond dynamics of electronic excitations. In living cells, protein complexes, and small molecules, we capture how these systems evolve with unprecedented depth and specificity.

Congratulations 9/15/2020

Dr. Richard Mazuski is off to start his new position at McKinsey and Co. Congratulations, Richard! We wish you well.

Congratulations 7/10/2020

Dr. Ryan Wood is off to start his new position at Intel. Congratulations, Ryan! We wish you well.

Paper Accepted 7/9/2020

Sara Sohail, John Otto, Ryan Wood, Marco Allodi, and Jake Higgins have had their paper entitled "DNA scaffold supports long-lived vibronic coherence in an indodicarbocyanine (Cy5) dimer" has been accepted to Chemical Science. The paper was written in collaboration with Joe Melinger, Paul Cunninghand and Youngchan Kim at NRL.

Research Resumption 6/17/2020

We are back in the lab doing our research safely and efficiently

Congratulations 6/13/2020

Congratulations to Ryan Wood on receiving his very real PhD at our virtual convocation.

Congratulations 6/13/2020

Congratulations to James Hayman on receiving his bachelor's degree from UChicago. Well done, James! We have loved working with you.

More News

Quantum Biology

Ultrafast Spectroscopy

Quantum Materials

Photocatalysis

Theory

Coherent Dynamics

Light Harvesting Materials

Ultrafast Chiral Response

Live Cell Studies

S.H. Sohail, J.P. Otto, P.D. Cunningham, Y.C. Kim, R.E. Wood, M.A. Allodi, J.S. Higgins, J.S. Melinger, and G.S. Engel, "DNA scaffold supports long-lived vibronic coherence in an indodicarbocyanine (Cy5) dimer", Chemical Science (accepted)