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Office phone: 706 542 0344 Lab phone: 706 583 8106 Fax: 706 542 2492 Email: ullrich@physast.uga.edu www.physast.uga.edu/people/fac-su |
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Department of Physics and Astronomy |
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Ullrich Group |
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Current openings |
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Contact: Susanne Ullrich The University of Georgia Department of Physics and Astronomy Room 243 Athens, GA 30602 USA
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Two 3 Year Ph.D. positions: Disentangling deactivation pathways in DNA bases and model systems using femtosecond photoelectron and photoion coincidence techniques and H-atom detection Vacancies exist for two, 3 year doctoral positions in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Georgia. The posts are funded by the National Science Foundation. The candidates should have strong interests in experimental physical chemistry or chemical physics. Experience with modern mass spectrometry and lasers would be advantageous but not necessary. The projects will be supervised by Dr Susanne Ullrich. The student stipend is $20600 per year, per student. The posts are available from January 2010.
Project Details Processes which involve the absorption of light play an integral role in our day-to-day lives. Nature has carefully chosen our molecular building blocks so that the potentially devastating effects of ultraviolet radiation are by-passed. The nucleic bases, adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine, which constitute the building blocks of our genetic code, DNA, absorb ultraviolet radiation very readily. Once absorbed, this energy is very efficiently diffused through harmless molecular relaxation pathways reducing the risk of molecular breakdown and therefore photochemical damage. The timescales of these photoresistive pathways must be very fast for them to compete effectively with the detrimental paths. It is becoming interestingly clear however that, although ultrafast measurements with lasers reveal very fast relaxation pathways, more refined experiments are required to test the ever increasingly sophisticated calculations that model the theory behind these pathways. The projects involve interrogating these molecules with sequences of ultrafast laser pulses to identify and completely characterize these pathways using state-of-the-art spectroscopic techniques such as femtosecond time-resolved photoelectron photoion coincidence techniques. The projects are of collaborative nature and students will spend a few weeks per year abroad working in Dr Stavros' group at the University of Warwick, UK.
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