This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This CAREER award, funded by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, supports an experimental research program by Professor Khalil of University of Washington to develop new spectroscopic techniques to measure coupled electronic and nuclear motions in chemical and biological systems. Multidimensional spectroscopies utilizing optical and infrared femtosecond fields will directly probe couplings between electronic and vibrational motions. This effort will include synthesizing new pulse sequences, interpreting and displaying the 3-D data set in an intuitive manner, and developing a theoretical framework for relating spectroscopic observables to physically relevant molecular parameters. The end goal of this project will be to use these novel spectroscopies to learn how the absorption of a photon translates into biological function in photoreceptor proteins.
The results from the experimental program described above will broadly impact the fields of ultrafast multidimensional spectroscopy and ultrafast photobiology. A detailed understanding of the photobiology photoreceptor proteins has implications for designing de novo photo-signaling proteins and bio-mimetic light-switching devices.
This proposal lies at the interface of optical, chemical and biological sciences, which provides a rich training ground for graduate and undergraduate students. In partnership with Seattle MESA (Mathematics Engineering Science Achievement) chapter, underrepresented minority students from Seattle high schools will spend a summer in the PI's laboratory performing experiments. Efforts in undergraduate curriculum development in physical chemistry will include developing a series of problems using examples from current biophysical literature and making them available to the wider scientific community via the internet.
