Bio
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 full R&D staff member. Ben's present work revolves around two major themes:1) understanding the molecular origins of chemical selectivity at interfaces, especially for chemical separations, using nonlinear optical methods to probe interfacial organization, orientation, and dynamics. 2) developing new tools to probe chemical localization and dynamics in complex living biosystems.
Awards
NASA Florida Space Grant Consortium (2004)
DOE Early Career Award (2018) - Separations Science
Specialized Equipment
vibrational sum frequency generation (vSFG)
electronic sum frequency generation (eSFG)
Femtosecond transient absorption microscopy (TAM)
Wide-field nonlinear microscopes: CARS, 2-Photon Fluorescence, SHG, etc.
Trademarks and Patents
Molecule structure probe methods, devices, and systems; Publication number: WO2014107449 A1, Publication date: Jul 10, 2014, Inventors: Kenneth B. Eisenthal and Benjamin Doughty