Department: Chemistry
Faculty Advisor: Brandi Cossairt
My name is Grant Dixon and I am a third year chemistry graduate student working in the lab of Dr. Brandi Cossairt. My research utilizes synthetic chemistry to study the photophysical behavior of colloidal nanocrystals as a function of chemical transformations on surfaces and across interfaces. Colloidal nanocrystals are of interest for next-generation, high-efficiency lighting technologies due to their size-dependent and surface-sensitive optical properties. Realizing these technologies at scale requires precise, deterministic synthetic developments that afford desired photophysical outcomes, which are historically lacking. I am approaching this problem through the synthesis of atomically-precise nanocrystal molecules with rigid ligand networks to resolve the influence of ligand dynamics and diffusion with high atomic-fidelity, and by leveraging collaborative efforts to observe the influence of synthetic parameters on the structural quality of core/shell nanocrystals.