Michael J. Therien
William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of ChemistryOverview
Our research involves the synthesis of compounds, supermolecular assemblies, nano-scale objects, and electronic materials with unusual ground-and excited-state characteristics, and interrogating these structures using state-of-the-art transient optical, spectroscopic, photophysical, and electrochemical methods. Research activities span physical inorganic chemistry, physical organic chemistry, synthetic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, spectroscopy, photophysics, excited-state dynamics, spintronics, and imaging. My laboratory: (i) designs chromophores and supermolecules that display exceptional opto-electronic properties and elucidates their excited-state dynamics, (ii) engineers highly conjugated molecular structures for optical limiting, specialized emission, and high charge mobility, (iii) designs conjugated materials and hybrid molecular-nanoscale structures for energy conversion reactions, (iv) develops molecular wires that propagate spin-polarized currents, (v) fabricates emissive nanoscale structures for in vivo optical imaging, (vi) engineers de novo transition metal cofactor-binding proteins that test light-driven biological energy transducing mechanisms and realize opto-electronic functionalities not found in nature, and (vii) designs and interrogates complex molecular and nanoscale assemblies in which ultrafast energy and charge migration reactions are controlled by quantum coherence effects.
Positions
William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemistry in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
2009 Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Professor of Chemistry in the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
2008 Trinity College of Arts & Sciences
Member of the Duke Cancer Institute in the School of Medicine
2008 School of Medicine
Education
B.S. 1982
1982 University of St. Andrews (United Kingdom)
Ph.D. 1987
1987 University of California, San Diego
NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellow, CHEMISTRY
1990 California Institute of Technology
Publications, Grants & Awards
Offices & Contact
Durham, NC
27708 Box 90346
Durham, NC
27708-0346