Education

Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Washington
Ph.D., University of Montreal

Teaching

I teach General Chemistry (CHEM 011), Organic Chemistry I (CHEM 022), Inorganic Chemistry (CHEM 056), Environmental Chemistry (CHEM 015 / ENVS 060), Climate Change: Science & Response (ENVS 010), and Painting, Chemistry and Conservation (CHEM 003B). I also teach laboratories in General (CHEM 010) and Organic Chemistry (CHEM 022).

Research

Our group is interested in designing hybrid inorganic semiconductor/organic moieties systems where energy and/or charge can be extracted from photoexcited semiconductor nanostructures and transferred to species that are bound to their surfaces. Such motifs are of particular relevance for the design of energy-harvesting and energy-storage systems which are presently severely limited by loss processes that are not well understood. We are designing approaches aimed at unraveling the structural complexity of nanocrystalline surfaces in order to understand how specific surface defects modulate the properties of nanocrystals, including the study of non-radiative recombination processes that lead to energy losses in nanocrystal-based devices.

Recent Publications

Reber, C., Castillo-Blum, S.E., Armenta-Jaime, E., Beaulac, R. Electronic Absorption Spectroscopy in Comprehensive Coordination Chemistry III, Constable, E. Parker, G., Que, L. (Eds). Elsevier (Amsterdam), 2021.

Dutta, P., Tang, Y., Mi, C., Saniepay, M., McGuire, J., Beaulac, R. Ultrafast Hole Extraction from Photoexcited Colloidal CdSe Quantum Dots Coupled to Nitroxide Free Radicals, J. Chem. Phys., 151 174706 (2019). (Invited contribution for special issue on “Colloidal Quantum Dots”).

Chen, Y., Landes, N. T., Little, D. J., Beaulac, R. Conversion Mechanism of Soluble Alkylamide Precursors for the Synthesis of Colloidal Nitride Nanomaterials, J. Amer. Chem. Soc., 140, 10421-10424 (2018).

Mi, C., Saniepay, M., Beaulac, R. Overcoming the Complex Excited-State Dynamics of Colloidal Cadmium Selenide Nanocrystals Involved in Energy Transfer Processes, Chem. Mater., 30, 5714-5725 (2018).

Saniepay, M., Aldrich, E. P., Beaulac, R. Insights into the Structural Complexity of Colloidal CdSe Nanocrystal Surfaces: Correlating the Efficiency of Non-Radiative Excited–State Processes to Specific Defects. J. Am. Chem. Soc., 140, 1725-1736 (2018).