Benjamin Doughty
Ben received his Ph.D. in 2010 from the University of California, Berkeley where he worked under Stephen R. Leone studying ultrafast electronic dynamics in atoms and small molecules using femtosecond soft X-ray/VUV light sources. From there, he joined the group of Kenneth B. Eisenthal at Columbia University where, as a postdoc, he developed new approaches to probe reaction kinetics, equilibrium structure, and binding affinities of biological molecules at microparticle interfaces. In 2013 Ben joined ORNL as a Wigner fellow and has since become a Senior R&D staff member. In 2018 Ben was awarded the Department of Energy's Office of Science Early Career Research Program award in Separations Science.
Postdocs
Pan Sun
Pan received his Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he worked under Huizhou Liu studying specific salt effects on the chemical separation of critical elements by solvent extraction. From there, he joined the ChemMarCARS, University of Chicago where as a postdoc, he studied interfacial phenomena and fundamentals in the separation of rare earths by liquid surface X-ray scattering. In 2023, Pan joined the group of Benjamin Doughty at ORNL as a postdoc, where he is working on the principles of ion recognition and transport in sustainable chemical separations using nonlinear vibrational spectroscopy.
Accepting Bredesen Center Graduate Students
We are hiring graduate students via the Bredesen Center for studies of interfaces at and away from equilibrium. Please contact Ben for more information.
Alumni
Uvinduni Premadasa
Uvinduni received her Ph.D. in 2020 from Ohio University, Athens where she worked under the supervision of Katherine Cimatu studying surface structures and molecular interactions at liquid surfaces using SFG spectroscopy. She then joined ORNL as a postdoc in January 2020. Uvi was hired as an Associate R&D Staff member in our group at ORNL in 2022.
Lu Lin
Lu received his Ph.D. in 2014 from Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he used second harmonic generation to study supramolecular chirality at interfaces. He continued working there for two and half years before joining Prof. Heather Allen's research group at The Ohio State University as a postdoc in January 2017. Lu's work at OSU was focused on molecular structures of aqueous surfaces using vibrational sum frequency generation spectroscopy. In March 2019, Lu moved to University of Notre Dame and worked there with Prof. Arnaldo Serrano on linear and nonlinear infrared spectroscopy. Lu joined ORNL as a postdoctoral research associate in December 2019, where he has been working with Ben Doughty and Yingzhong Ma to understand the chemistry of buried Liquid/Liquid interfaces using SFG and neutron scattering methods. Currently, Lu is working with Tim Lian at Emory.
Azhad Chowdhury
Currently at Boise St. as a research scholar (as of Oct. 2020)