Shumaker-Parry Lab

2017 CaSTL Summer Diversity Research Fellow with focus in Chiral Plasmon-Driven Chemistry

Summer 2016 - My research focuses on the fabrication, characterization and applications of aluminum plasmonic antennas. Current applications being investigated include chemical and biological sensing and photochemistry.

Chirality is a property of asymmetry with significance in many branches of science and refers to the handedness of a material. Plasmonic materials have also been observed to exhibit handedness in response to light, which represents the basis of chiral plasmonics. I focus on the fabrication and characterization of nanomaterials (as related to chiral plasmonics) prepared using a copper mask nanosphere template lithography method developed in our lab.

My research focuses on the self-assembly of Au nanoparticle and Ag nanocube dimer structures to produce localized fields that will lead to enhanced Raman spectroscopy signals.