Tianquan Lian
Tianquan “Tim” Lian is the William Henry Emerson Professor of Chemistry at Emory University, and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Chemical Physics. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Xiamen University, a master’s degree in chemical physics from the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a doctorate in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a professor at Emory University since 1996.
Professor Lian’s research is focused on ultrafast energy and charge transfer dynamics in photovoltaic and photocatalytic nanomaterials and at their interfaces. The long term goal of Professor Lian's research program is to contribute to the advancement of solar energy conversion science and technology through basic research. Currently, his research efforts are focused on the preparation, characterization and fundamental understanding of photovoltaic and photocatalytic nanomaterials. Of particular interest are fundamental dynamical processes in the materials and their interfaces (such as charge transfer, solvation, energy transfer and relaxation) which are not only essential to their functions, but also relevant to many other materials and applications. Researchers in Lian's lab utilize state-of-the-art laser spectroscopic and imaging techniques (femtosecond transient absorption in the visible and IR, nonlinear second harmonic and sum frequency generation, and single molecule/particle fluorescence) to investigate these processes. They aim at achieving fundamental understanding of these processes by designing experiments that can be used to test modern theory and computational modeling.
