Department of Chemical Engineering
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA

ABSTRACT

Structure, surface chemistry, and energetic disorder can dramatically affect excited state dynamics in low-dimensional systems. Using a combination of ultrafast laser spectroscopy, time-resolved optical microscopy, and kinetic modeling, I will show how these effects manifest in assemblies of colloidal quantum dots (QD) and atomically thin 2D semiconductors, which are promising components of next-generation photovoltaic and lighting technologies. In particular, I will demonstrate the counterintuitive role of entropy in the nonequilibrium population dynamics of excitons and charge carriers in nanoscale systems, and how these dynamics are influenced by the surface and structural organizational of these nanomaterials.

BIO

Will Tisdale joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT in January, 2012, where he holds the rank of Associate Professor and is currently the ARCO Career Development Professor in Energy Studies. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2005, a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2010, and was a postdoc in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT before joining the faculty in 2012. Will is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the DOE Early Career Award, the NSF CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, the AIChE Nanoscale Science & Engineering Forum Young Investigator Award, and MIT’s Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.