Rebecca L. M. Gieseking

Assistant Professor

Email: gieseking@brandeis.edu

Office: Shapiro Science Center 3-12

Phone: 781-736-2511

Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University, 2015-2018

Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015

M.S., Furman University, 2010

B.S., Furman University, 2009

Rebecca was born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, GA. She obtained her B.S. at Furman University, where she majored in both chemistry and studio art. Her background in art sparked her interest in computational and theoretical chemistry because these techniques enable visualizing molecular processes on an atom-by-atom basis in a way that is not typically possible in the lab. She continued at Furman for an M.S. in chemistry with Tim Hanks, performing computational and synthetic work on halogen bonding in organic molecules. She completed her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in the group of Jean-Luc Bredas. Her research focused on using computational approaches to understand the third-order nonlinear optical properties of materials based on π-conjugated molecules such as cyanines. As a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University working with George Schatz and Mark Ratner, she extended her interest in optical properties to metal systems, developing computational tools to understand plasmon-like behavior in noble metal nanoclusters and the origins of chemical effects in plasmon-enhanced spectroscopic techniques. She began her independent career at Brandeis University in July 2018.