Hello! My name is Michelle Bechtel and I’m going to be a sophomore this year at Colby College. My research is on fluorescence spectroscopy of conjugated organic molecules. We are interested in predicting the wavelengths of a molecule’s emitted photons and how they change depending on its surrounding solvent. I am focusing a lot of my time on alizarin, a red pigment molecule, because of its applications to the fields of art conservation and restoration. To perform our calculations, we used computational softwares including WebMO and Gaussian 16 to perform geometry optimizations, as well as TD-DFT and Franck-Condon calculations. Thanks for stopping by!
