Chemical Physics

Graduate Student Lane Terry joins the lab.

Graduate Student River Leversee joins the lab. He won a prestigious Stewardship Science Graduate Fellowship from the Department of Energy. River will be working on the properties of materials under high pressure.

Together with graduate students Lane Terry and Maddie Klumb, Fellow Mathias Weber studies how ions are selectively bound to molecular receptors.

The molecule HBDI is the “chromophore” that gives green fluorescent protein in jellyfish its glow. Together with Visiting Fellow Prof. Jan Verlet (Durham University, UK), graduate students Wyatt Zagorec-Marks and Madison Foreman from the Weber Group examined the photophysics of this molecule and found that the environment—down to a single water molecule—surrounding it can greatly influence its behavior.