Valentine Vullev
University of California-Riverside, CA·Chemistry
Moving an electron from one place in a molecule to another is the basic step behind photosynthesis, batteries and solar cells. When such a transfer goes the wrong way — the electron falling back to where it started — energy is wasted.
- Fields
Chemistry
Materials Science
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
charge transfer
electron transfer
charge recombination
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Develop spectroscopic methods using electrochromism (the optical Stark effect, in which local electric fields shift absorption spectra) to probe and map molecular dipoles and the nanometer-scale fields they generate.
- Quantify experimentally how dipole-generated electric fields shift the redox potentials of attached electron donors and acceptors in bio-inspired molecular electrets.
- Measure how the magnitude and orientation of ordered dipoles in anthranilamide-based molecular electrets change charge-transfer rates.
- Test whether dipole effects on charge-transfer kinetics depend on the thermodynamic driving force relative to the reorganization energy, to identify conditions that suppress charge recombination.
More about the research
Electric dipoles, the tiny separations of positive and negative charge found in almost every molecule, push and pull on moving electrons and can either help or hinder the transfer. Because dipoles are everywhere, understanding exactly how they steer charge transfer is the problem this project takes on.
Why it matters
Charge recombination is one of the main loss channels in solar energy conversion and in molecular and organic electronics. Rules for how molecular dipoles speed up or slow down specific charge-transfer steps could help designers of light-harvesting materials and molecular devices keep separated charges apart longer, and would also sharpen understanding of bioenergetics, where natural systems do the same trick with ordered dipoles.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brian Collins
Washington State University, WA·Materials Science
Map the nanoscale arrangement of molecules in three- and four-component organic solar cell blends using spectral analysis of resonant soft X-ray nanoprobes, and correlate structure with device performance.
Dorsa Parviz
Arizona State University Campus Immersion, AZ·Chemistry·Early-career
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.
Min Ouyang
University of Maryland, MD·Chemistry
Establish chemical principles for making ligand-free, all-inorganic chiral hybrid nanostructures that combine plasmonic, excitonic and spin functions in a single particle.
The school
University of California-Riverside: 21 labs on PI Pages, $232M a year on research, 328 research doctorates a year.
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