Looking over a new instrument.
The Landes Research Group develops new spectroscopic tools to image chemical dynamics at interfaces at the limit of a single event. Using this super-resolved chemical knowledge, we create new models to understand and predict macroscale processes like protein separation and photocatalysis.
A wide range of biological and materials processes rely on nanoscale interfacial dynamics. Single molecule methods allow us to identify the chemical complexity of these interactions by revealing the underlying populations that form the ensemble measurement. In doing so, we can identify and tune the rare chemical populations that play a crucial role in reactivity.
The cost of bringing a new protein based therapeutic to market averages ~$2.6 billion dollars, of which 50% can be dedicated to isolating and purifying the active compound. A primary contributor to the cost is the empirical optimization of chromatographic separation. Our lab seeks to understand separations from the scale of individual analytes, with a goal to create a new predictive model of chromatography to eliminate the need for costly empirical methods.
The Abbe diffraction limit sets a lower bound of a few hundred nanometers for the size of objects we can observe with traditional optical microscopy. This limit is defined by light’s wavelength. Our lab develops new mathematical methods to break the Abbe diffraction limit and achieve spatial resolutions of just a few nanometers and time resolutions faster than traditional cameras frame times.