About me..

In summer 2018, I started a research company called Catamaran Labs LLC to develop and sell the spectroscopic instrument I designed during my postdoc in Berkeley. I am currently looking for collaborators studying thin films, membranes, and nanostructures. I would like to design and deliver customized instruments that will allow researchers to record high-sensitivity spectra of either static or reacting samples. Our novel optical design (patent in preparation) can also allow penetration depth tunability and real-time reaction monitoring.

From 2016 to 2018, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the Chemical Dynamics Division inthe group of Musa Ahmed. I worked to design and build new experimental techniques that allowed investigation of water in in nano-confined and nano-solvated environments. Our novel attenuated total reflectance spectrometer provides in situ IR access to samples bound to Si wafers without blocking physical access to the sample, allowing temperature and environmental control and direct access to chemical reactions in real time.


In 2016 I received my PhD in Chemical Physics from the University of Colorado Boulder working for Barney Ellison studying the thermal decomposition pathways of biofuel intermediates. This led to the study of a beautiful quantum mechanical molecules like benzyl radical, tropyl radical, and cyclopentadienyl radical.

To investigate these molecules, the Ellison group couples a tubular micro-reactor ("Chen Nozzle") to an array of detection mechanisms including:

  1. Photoionization Mass Spectrometry using 118.2 nm (10.5 eV) and tunable synchrotron light (ALS in Berkeley, CA and SLS in Switzerland)
  2. Matrix isolation Vibrational (IR) Spectroscopy in Neon and Argon
  3. Tabletop Femtosecond VUV Photoionization and Photoelectron Photoion Coincidence Spectroscopy
  4. Frequency comb IR absorption spectroscopy
  5. Chirped pulse Fourier Transform Microwave Spectroscopy

Before working in the Ellison group I spent 2 years in the group of David J. Nesbitt in JILA, where we performed high-resolution (sub-Doppler) rovibrational spectroscopy on reactive radicals and ions including phenyl, radical, trans-HOCO, and a few isotopomers of ammonium (NH4+ and ND3H+).