Dr. Randall Goldsmith is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin Madison, where he has assembled a team of physical, analytical, materials, organic, and inorganic chemists as well as physicists, electrical engineers, biophysicists, and neuroscientists. Professor Goldsmith studies ways of using light to observe, alter, or even control the behavior of molecules, blending chemical spectroscopy and microscopy with photonics, microfluidics, nanofabrication, and chemical synthesis, and working toward applications spanning materials science, quantum optics, catalysis, and biology.  Recent research highlights include the development of microresonator spectrometers for single-molecule spectroscopy for applications such as performing measurements on individual conducting polymer molecules or reacting nanoparticles, using plasmonic nanostructures to explore cooperativity in an ion channel regulatory domain and enable extremely high-concentration single-molecule spectroscopy experiments, and making observations on the initiation dynamics of single working molecular catalysts and the conformational dynamics of disordered proteins. Visit the Goldsmith Lab website for more information on their work.

Planned Polymaths Work: Dr. Goldsmith will pursue the development of new fabrication strategies to create novel devices capable of dramatically altering the properties of light.