Christy Landes

Talk Title: A mechanism for plasmon-generate solvated electrons

Christy F. Landes is the Kenneth S. Pitzer-Schlumberger Chair Professor of Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, TX and holds appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. She earned her BS from George Mason University in 1998 and completed a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 under the direction of Mostafa El-Sayed.

She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon and an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin under the direction of Geraldine Richmond and Paul Barbara, respectively, before joining the University of Houston as an assistant professor in 2006. She moved to Rice in 2009.

Christy is the Director of the NSF Phase I Center for Adapting Flaws into Features. She is the 2023 Chair of the Physical Chemistry Division of the American Chemical Society. She is a senior editor of the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters, and serves on the Editorial Advisory Boards of ACS Nano and Accounts of Chemical Research. She is a Kavli Fellow and an ACS Fellow.

The Landes Group is comprised of chemists, applied physicists, and engineers who develop next-generation tools to image dynamics at soft interfaces at the limit of a single event. Her group devises new methods and models for controlling macroscale processes such as protein separations and photocatalysis using this super-resolved chemical knowledge. The group also uses advanced signal and image processing methods to improve accuracy and precision in low-signal measurements. Christy’s outreach activities emphasize the importance of mathematics and computer programming in our increasingly data-driven world. Her goal for the community is to underscore our common values despite the expanding need to broaden and redefine our respective specializations.