47414-SE
Optical Probes of Dynamics in Complex Environments, at the ACS National Meeting, April 2008, New Orleans, LA
The symposium Optical Probes of Dynamics in Complex Environments held at the ACS National meeting April 6-10, 2008, brought together researchers from around the world for sessions on protein dynamics, methods development, time-resolved structure, solvation, complex materials, optical control and the dynamics of water. The program spanned 9 sessions from Sunday morning through Thursday afternoon and included 35 invited talks, 28 contributed talks, and 27 posters. Invited speakers included scientists from the United States and Canada, China, Japan, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, and The Netherlands. Contributed talks also came from a solid national and international contingent. Both invited and contributed talks were delivered by scientists spanning the range from senior graduate students and postdoctoral scholars to senior professors and established scientists. The average attendance was fifty in each session with a high of over a hundred in the middle of the week. The symposium explored experimental studies of complex dynamics in chemical and biophysical systems, and the theoretical efforts to understand both these experiments and the dynamics revealed by them. Particular emphasis was placed on new experimental methods used to probe dynamics in clusters, liquids, proteins and solids including multidimensional spectroscopies, time resolved structure determination, optical control, energy migration, charge separation, chemical reaction dynamics, and time-resolved imaging. Speakers partially supported by the ACS PRF SE grant included: Jasper Knoester “Modeling two-dimensional infrared spectroscopy of polypeptides and proteins;” Yuxiang Weng “Nanoparticle induced light-harvesting membrane protein deformation (LH2) revealed by ultrafast spectroscopic study of the excitonic states;” Markus Motzkus “Pump-DFWM spectroscopy on beta-Carotene with shaped femtosecond pulses;” and Christian Bressler “Femtosecond and picosecond x-ray spectroscopy in chemical dynamics research.”
