Two vignettes made possible by ultrafast 2D spectroscopy : The structure of an amyloid protein oligomer and insights into exciton transfer in photovoltaics

Please join Yale Chemistry for a Silliman Seminar in Physical Chemistry with Prof. Martin T. Zanni, F. Fleming Crim WARF Professor and Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Abstract: Two short vignettes will be presented. The first will be about an amyloid protein involved in type 2 diabetes which forms toxic oligomers. By monitoring the aggregation of the proteins using 2D IR spectroscopy, we deduced the mechanism, which allowed us to trap the transient structures and generate the first atomic structure. The structure helps explain why some, but not all, species develop type 2 diabetes and may explain a genetic mutation that can result in early onset diabetes. The second vignette will be about solar cells made from semiconducting carbon nanotubes using action detection. Action detection suffers from a large background that prevents its application to most photovoltaics, but we invented a spectroscopy trick that eliminates this drawback. We have learned that the exciton dynamics most prevent in a film are not the ones responsible for current in the devices, leading us to alter the device architecture. This talk will be a mixture of spectroscopy, biophysics and materials science, accessible to everyone.

Bio: Martin T. Zanni is the F. Fleming Crim WARF Professor and Meloche-Bascom Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley, working with Dan Neumark, and was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Robin Hochstrasser. He is one of the early pioneers of 2D IR spectroscopy and has made many technological innovations that have broadened the capabilities and scope of multidimensional spectroscopies and microscopies. He utilizes these new techniques to study topics in biophysics, chemical physics, photovoltaics, and surfaces. He has received many national and international accolades for his research. Notably, he is the only person to have received the ACS Nobel Laureate Signature Award as both a student and a mentor and the first person to receive the Craver, Coblentz, and Lippincott Awards. He founded PhaseTech Spectroscopy Inc., which is the first company to commercialize 2D IR and 2D Electronic spectroscopies. He was elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2025. For more information on Prof. Zanni's research: Current Research – Zanni Group – UW–Madison

Hosted by Prof. Eric Arsenault

Sponsored by the Mrs. Hepsa Ely Silliman Memorial Fund.