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.

New Assistant Professor 12/13/2018

Congratulations to Professor Sara Massey on accepting a tenure-track assistant professor position at Southwestern University's Chemistry Department

New Graduate Students 11/30/2018

Welcome to Siddhartha Sohoni and Sami Abdulhadi, who are joining the group as new graduate students.

Paper Accepted 11/22/2018

Congratulations to Andrew Hu and our other collaborators in the Kais group on having our paper entitled, "Double-excitation manifold’s effect on exciton transfer dynamics and the efficiency of coherent light harvesting" accepted to PCCP.

New Undergraduate Researcher 10/18/2018

Welcome to Karen Ji! Karen is a new undergraduate researcher in the group.

Paper Accepted 10/4/2018

Congratulations to Nick Williams and Lili Wang as well as our collaborators in the Talapin and Schaller Groups on having their paper entitled, "The origin of broad emission spectra in InP quantum dots: contributions from structural and electronic disorder", accepted to JACS.

Benjamin Ball Freud Teaching Fellow 9/27/2018

Sara Massey was named the inaugural Benjamin Ball Freud Teaching Fellow in the Department of Chemistry. Sara will teach the Chemistry 101-102 sequence, an intensive, two-quarter general chemistry sequence with a rigorous active learning curriculum.

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