Dr Raj Pandya
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Dr Raj Pandya
Assistant Professor
Summary
My research focuses on using light to visualise and control the quantum dynamics of atoms and electrons inside materials. To achieve this, my team and I build and apply advanced laser spectroscopy/microscopy experiments (visible-IR, THz and X-ray wavelength ranges), as well as tools & theories to interpret them. Currently, we are particularly interested in how we can follow random processes (such as ion hopping in battery relevant materials); exploit entangled photons and twisted light to access different molecular states in organic semiconductors; and study the individual femtosecond electronic-transfer steps in non-light driven reactions (e.g., electro-catalytic cycles). Work in the group is highly interdisciplinary/collaborative, with students exposed to a wide range of techniques from non-linear optics and signal processing/coding to nanomaterials chemistry.
Biography
I studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Oxford (Part II with Andrew Goodwin, FRS). I then moved to Cambridge for a PhD on the physics of optoelectronic materials (with Akshay Rao). Following this I was awarded an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship and Junior Research Fellowship by Clare College, Cambridge which I mostly spent in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, working on imaging in complex environments (with Sylvain Gigan, Hilton Barbosa and Hugo Defienne’s teams). In 2024 I joined Warwick Chemistry as an Assistant Professor.
- 2024-present Assistant Professor (Head of iCCD Lab), Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick, UK
- 2020-2023 Junior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK/Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), France
- 2016-2020 PhD., (Optoelectronics Group, Department of Physics) University of Cambridge, UK
- 2012-2016 MChem., University of Oxford (Undergraduate)