Thuc-Quyen Nguyen

Biography

Thuc-Quyen Nguyen is the Professor in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Professor Nguyen received her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Physical Chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1997, 1998, and 2001, respectively. Her thesis research focused on processing and photophysics of conducting polymers using ultrafast spectroscopy under the supervision of Professor Benjamin Schwartz. She was a research associate in the Department of Chemistry and the Nanocenter at Columbia University working with Professors Louis Brus and Colin Nuckolls on molecular self-assembly, nanoscale characterization and charge transport. She also spent time at IBM Research Center at T. J. Watson (Yorktown Heights, NY) working with Drs. Richard Martel and Phaedon Avouris on molecular electronics. She joined the faculty of the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department at UCSB in July 2004.

Research

Our group’s research interests center on organic semiconductors, with an emphasis on the physical characterization of multicomponent composites and the development of structure-function relationships that provide guidelines for optimizing device performance. Such materials form the basis of new and emerging technologies, in which complex electronic function is produced by simple printing techniques. It is sometimes called the Organic Electronics Revolution. The challenge we have set ourselves is to establish how molecular structure and processing methods can be rationally implemented in applications, such as transistors, photodetectors, solar cells, light-emitting diodes, ratchets, and biosensors. There is a need to understand the factors that influence the photophysics, morphology, and charge transport within complex thin films, where multiple components and a non-isotropic distribution of molecular sites are in existence; a very different situation from conventional silicon-based semiconductors. To tackle the problem, we incorporate a wide range of characterization techniques in which properties can be measured within nanoscale domains.