Professor Luisa Whittaker-Brooks

​Professor Luisa Whittaker-Brooks
​Department of Chemistry
The University of Utah
Printable Abstract

Defects Chemistry as a Design Parameter to Enable Functional Electronics

The advancement of electronics, along with its cornerstones - the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and energy-related devices - is closely linked to our ability to control “good” and “bad” defects at different length scales. Nonetheless, this progress faces constraints due to significant variability and a prevailing phenomenological approach to materials design. In this talk, we will discuss how defects chemistry can be used to: (1) control the assembly of layered inorganic and organic systems and interfaces at the molecular level (orientation and mode of attachment), (2) match phonon band structure in coordination polymers with discrete vibrations within the molecule, and (3) tune energetic offsets for effective charge and spin transfer in self-doped organic materials. This defect control as a design parameter may ultimately govern charge transport, the preservation of coherence, and energy transfer in functional electronic and energy devices. We will also discuss how we can use diffraction and spectroscopy to correlate changes in the electronic structure as a function of the morphology and defect states in layered metal chalcogenides and π-d conjugated organic systems. We will then compare and contrast different doping methods to increase the carrier and spin concentrations in materials.

Luisa Whittaker-Brooks

Dr. Luisa Whittaker-Brooks is the John A. Widtsoe Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah. Her research centers on the design of hybrid materials that serve as conduits for deterministic and coherent energy and charge transfer. Dr. Whittaker-Brooks received her B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of Panama. Under a Fulbright Fellowship, she received her Ph.D. degree in Materials Chemistry from the University at Buffalo. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Princeton University. She was named a Scialog and Cottrell Fellow by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, a Talented 12 by C&En news, and a GERA Ovshinsky Energy Fellow by the American Physical Society. She is also the recipient of a Department of Energy Early Career Award and a Sloan Fellowship in Chemistry. She was also awarded the Outstanding Early Career Investigator by the Materials Research Society and the Rising Star award by the American Chemical Society Women’s committee.

Hosted by Professor Lee Penn