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Dorsa Parviz

Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Chemistry·Early-career

Electrons moving across the surface of a material drive sensors, catalysts and many energy technologies. Yet scientists still cannot predict how electrons move across the rough, uneven surfaces of real materials.

Fields

Chemistry

Materials Science

Engineering

Topics

interfacial electron transfer

charge transfer

electrostatics

Grants
1 known grant, through Jul 2031

What they work on

  1. Synthesize mixed-metal oxides with controlled composition gradients, defects and surface terminations to create tunable nanoscale electrostatic landscapes, and map them with surface-potential measurements.
  2. Visualize where electron transfer is fast, slow or absent across uneven surfaces using redox-responsive fluorescent probes and single-molecule imaging.
  3. Combine imaging data with machine learning and physics-based simulations to find predictive links between local electrostatics and electron-transfer rates, and to uncover mechanisms such as charge trapping and screening.

More about the research

Small changes in composition, defects and surface chemistry create local electric fields over just tens of nanometers. These fields can speed up, slow down or redirect electron transfer. Measurements that average over large areas miss these variations.

Why it matters

Rules for controlling how charge moves across complex surfaces could guide the design of more efficient catalysts, sensors and energy materials. Linking nanoscale surface structure to electron-transfer behavior could replace trial-and-error with design principles for these technologies.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

CAREER: From Maps to Mechanisms: Engineering Interfacial Electron Transfer via Nanoscale Electrostatic Landscapes

NSF · Aug 2026 – Jul 2031

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The school

Arizona State University Campus Immersion: 36 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 625 research doctorates a year.

More about Arizona State University Campus Immersion

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