We celebrate the successful thesis defense of Gustavo “Gus” Mondragón who has now completed his Masters degree and is now on to getting a PhD in our group. Gustavo has worked on the search for multiexcitonic states and their involvement in the excitonic transference between photosynthetic pigments, specifically between bacteriochlorophyll-d molecules (BChl-d) from the bchQRU chlorosome whose whole structure is shown in the gallery below. To this end, Gustavo has studied and implemented the Restricted Active Space method with double spin flip (RAS-2SF) with the use of QChem5.0, a method that has required the use and understanding of states with high multiplicities. Additionally, Gustavo has investigated the influence of the environment within the chlorosome by performing ONIOM calculations for the spectroscopic properties of a BChl-d dimer, finding albeit qualitatively a batochromic effect, probably an expected result but nonetheless an impressive feat for the level of theory selected.

  • BChQRU chlorosome. 600 Bchl-d molecules

There’s still a lot of work to do in this line of research and although we’re eager to publish our results in this excitonic transference mechanism we want to be completely sure that we’re taking every possibility into consideration so we don’t incur into any inconsistencies.

Gustavo cultivates many research interests from excited states of these pigments to biochemical processes that require the use of various tools; I’m sure his permanence in our lab will bring lots of interesting results. Congratulations, Gus! Thank you for your hard work.

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