Ryan McDonnell awarded Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Instrumentation
Ryan McDonnell
Postdoctoral Researcher Ryan McDonnell has been awarded the prestigious and highly competitive Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Instrumentation for research he will be carrying out in Professor Eric Arsenault’s lab at Yale.
The Arnold & Mabel Beckman Foundation awards fellowships to individuals who underscore the Foundation’s mission of supporting basic research in the chemical sciences and instrumentation. The Foundation will provide McDonnell with $224,000 over two years for salary, fringe benefits, and research expenditures, and an additional one-time payment of up to $200,000 for material and development costs.
McDonnell’s award-winning research project is on “Ultrabroadband 2D-Electronic-Raman Spectroscopy: Direct Mapping of Excited-State Reaction Coordinates in Complex Systems.”
Of the research, McDonnell explains, “Light can control chemical reactivity, but we still don’t have a good understanding of how some light-initiated reactions take place. A tell-tale way to investigate chemical structure is vibrational spectroscopy. With graduate students in the Arsenault Lab, we will develop a new ultrafast spectrometer that lets us take ‘pictures’ of the evolving vibrational structure of photoexcited molecules, giving us new insight into how light-initiated chemistry works and, ultimately, the structure of excited-state surfaces.”
Research in the Arsenault Lab focuses on developing and applying ultrafast spectroscopies to understand the dynamics of complex nanoscale systems.
You can read more about McDonnell’s achievement in the press release below.