Teaching and mentoring
Teaching physical chemistry from the instrument outward
My teaching centres on connecting conceptual rigour to what an instrument actually measures. Students who have derived a selection rule and then seen the corresponding band appear — and seen how noisy and ambiguous real data can be — understand both far better than either alone.
Teaching philosophy
Teaching physical chemistry and spectroscopy means balancing conceptual rigour with practical experience. My approach has three parts: building a solid theoretical foundation, reinforcing it through quantitative problem-solving, and connecting classroom concepts to real experimental systems.
The third part is where I think most courses stop short. A spectrum in a textbook has already been cleaned, assigned and interpreted. A spectrum from an instrument has a baseline problem, an overlapping band, and a plausible-looking feature that turns out to be an artefact. Working through that gap is what turns a student who can recite a selection rule into one who can do research.
I want students to leave a course able to ask what a measurement can and cannot establish. That habit — never letting a single technique carry a claim on its own — is the one I most want to pass on, because it is the one that has shaped my own work.
Mentoring
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Research mentoring of graduate students
During a research professorship, worked alongside doctoral and master's students on the centre's shared ultrafast spectroscopy instruments — training students on 2D IR and pump–probe measurement, guiding data analysis and fitting, and co-authoring the resulting publications. Several of the co-authored papers from this period had a student as first author.
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Collaborative supervision across research groups
Contributed the spectroscopic and computational component of collaborations with materials chemistry and electrochemistry groups in India and Korea, working directly with the students who led those projects on experiment design, calculation and interpretation.
Proposed new electives
Courses I would like to develop, drawing directly on current research. Each would combine lectures with simulation-based assignments, data-analysis exercises on real measurements, and instrument demonstrations.
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Nonlinear and Ultrafast Spectroscopy
Advanced undergraduate and postgraduate
Principles and applications of pump–probe and two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy, fluorescence upconversion and transient absorption. Lectures paired with simulation-based assignments, real data-analysis exercises and instrument demonstrations, so that students see how a spectrum becomes a dynamical quantity.
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Polaritonic and Quantum Chemistry
Postgraduate
Strong light–matter coupling and its implications for chemical reactivity — including the parts of the field that remain contested, which makes it a good setting for teaching students how to weigh conflicting experimental evidence.
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Interfacial Electrochemistry
Postgraduate
Linking surface science, spectroscopy and energy conversion: the electric double layer, operando spectro-electrochemistry, and how interfacial structure sets catalytic selectivity.
Academic service and outreach
Intend to contribute to departmental and institutional development through curriculum design, academic committee service, and the organisation of scientific workshops and outreach programmes with local schools and communities.