Professor Troy Van Voorhis

Professor Troy Van Voorhis
Department of Chemistry
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

Electron and Energy Transfer in Molecules and Materials

Electronic reactions play a key role in understanding a host of physical processes – electron transfer reactions that power electrochemistry, energy transfer reactions that drive photosynthesis and electron spin dynamics that govern magnetism, just to name a few. In this talk, we will discuss how the “reactant” and “product” states for these types reactions can be clearly defined using the electron density as the fundamental variable. In particular, we will highlight the utility of diabatic electronic states in qualitatively and quantitively describing these fascinating systems. We will show how this picture leads to a unified description of electron transfer in photochemistry, energy transfer in molecular devices and singlet fission in solar cells.

Troy Van Voorhis

Dr. Troy Van Voorhis is the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry at MIT, where he currently serves as department head. His research focuses on electronic structure theory, with particular focus on electronic excited states and photochemical dynamics. Prof. Van Voorhis received his B.A. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Rice University, his PhD in Chemistry from UC Berkeley and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. Prof. Van Voorhis is an NSF CAREER Fellow, a David and Lucille Packard Fellow, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow and was awarded MIT’s School of Science Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Host: Professor Kade Head-Marsden