Experimental physical and materials chemistry, with a focus on nanocrystal surfaces.
Our lab explores the formation, physical properties, and interfacial chemistry of
nanoscale materials. Materials that we make in our lab include nanocrystal quantum
dots (QDs) superparamagnetic oxide nanocrystals; we also examine a variety of other
low-dimensional materials in collaborative projects. A strong inspiration for this
work is the opportunity to impact fields including energy conversion, energy storage,
bioimaging, and biomedicine.
There are two general themes that guide our choice of problems. One is an attempt
to develop surface-sensitive metrics, purification strategies, and synthetic steps
for QDs and other colloidal nanocrystals that permit increasingly precise and sophisticated
control of the resulting physical and chemical properties. Such control is necessary
for improving the performance of QD solar cells and other nanocrystal-based devices,
and for advancing the biomedical applications of nanocrystal-based imaging and therapeutic
agents. The second concerns the transport of matter, charge, and energy within nanoscale
systems and across interfaces. We use microfabrication, optoelectronic measurements,
and functional imaging techniques to characterize these transport processes. These
themes are explored in several project areas.
Graduate and undergraduate students with a variety of academic interests including
physical, inorganic, and organic chemistry; physics; biological sciences; and electrical
engineering will be able to make strong contributions to the group’s research. Group
members employ techniques including air-free synthetic chemistry, NMR spectroscopy,
calorimetry, chemical vapor deposition, scanning and transmission electron microscopy,
microfabrication, and photoluminescence imaging and spectroscopy. Instrument control,
data analysis, and technical image analysis is done with computational tools such
as Matlab and Image-J.
Undergraduates interested in research opportunities should contact Prof. Greytak directly
with a CV and a note regarding your professional goals. Prospective graduate students
are advised to consult the Department’s graduate admissions page
Prof. Greytak's Nanoscience course returns Fall 2025 as Chem 649 / 749 -- this can serve as a Physical Chemistry core course for Chemistry PhD students, but is also a good introduction to solid state and materials chemistry, analytical techniques, and recent literature for Chemistry undergrads and for graduate students across physics, chemistry, and engineering disciplines! More on the Academics page.
We're on GitHub! We use Matlab a lot for data analysis -- to help people get started, Andrew Greytak has developed a "chemists tutorial" for Matlab, learning to use Matlab to plot data, do matrix math and curve fitting, and analyze images, with examples from physical chemistry! You can try it out. A portion was presented as part of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry's "ChemCamp" tutorial seminar series, along with Morgan Stefik. More of our projects will be shared in the future!
Halide perovskite quantum dots can be amazingly bright emitters, but their surface chemistry is very important! What are some ways effective lead halide perovskite surfaces can be put together? Jennii, Bishal, and Sakiru assembled a Focus Review, now out in ACS Energy Letters, looking at native surface termination, exchange of coordinating ligands, and reactive chemistry approaches! Link to ACS Energy Letters.
We visited the awesome summer camp program at the South Carolina State Museum twice this summer to share our enthusiasm for chemistry, light, and color, making things bubble and glow! We've re-built our "dot box" display to show off fluorescent materials, check out the spectrum of different light sources, and we even had some quantum dots in glass to pass around. Great questions from the kids!
Jolina (Cet) Deng joined our lab for 8 weeks this summer through USC's ACS SEED program. She studied purification techniques for magnetite iron oxide nanocrystals in aqueous solutions, working with Jennii, and impressed the judges with her description of her work at the concluding symposium. Best of luck to Cet for her senior year at Spring Valley High School!
Dr. Gryphon Drake was one of the inaugural winners of the Poster Award at the (awesome!) American Conference on Inorganic Nanocrystals at Mt. Snow, Vermont this July, for his work on nanocrystal precursor chemistry, supported by the NSF Division of Chemistry.
Jennii Burrell's collaboration with the Shustova lab, detecting coordination of actinide cations by a photoswitchable metal-organic framework via isothermal titration calorimetry, has been published in Chemical Science! Congrats to Kyoungchul Park and the whole Shustova lab team for accomplishing this work!
Moinul, Jennii, and Camilla presented their work at the 2025 Discover USC conference at the Columbia Metropolitan Convention Center.
Camilla Morgan was awarded a prestigious Magellan Scholar Grant from the USC Office of Undergraduate Research for her research project on purification of superparamagnetic nanocrystals.
The College of Arts and Sciences First Year Undergraduate Research Initiative, led by Profs. Simoska, Hosseini, and Fountain, puts first-year Chemistry and Biochemistry majors on the fast track to independent research by building common lab skills in chemistry prep and spectroscopy, and then linking them up with projects in participating research labs like ours. Veby Youssef, Camilla Morgan, and Connor Dow joined our lab this Spring with Jennii Burrell and Moinul Islam as mentors. Here’s our excitation-emission setup: some assembly required!
First-year Chemistry graduate students Farjana H. Mitu and Nuwandi K. Jayasekara have joined the lab!
Quantum Dots were first explored as pigments in glass, so we took a group trip to One Eared Cow Glass here in Columbia to learn about the other kind of glassware and some of the chemistry inside it!
Congratulations to Alexei Ekimov, Louis Brus, and Moungi Bawendi … and the work of the many colleagues, students, and entrepreneurs who have helped to demonstrate the beauty and significance of these tiny, shiny crystals! An excellent history of quantum dots is described in this Nano Letters perspective by Brus and Alexander Efros:
Gryphon joined the College of Arts and Sciences as a postdoctoral associate in July 2023, having completed his PhD at the University of Illinois with Prof. Moonsub Shim. He will be conducting research on semiconductor nanocrystal ligand exchange chemistry, and also teaching Chem 141M in Spring 2024.