Vázquez Research Group

The nature of the excited state in organic optoelectronic materials determines their quantum accessibility and flexibility. The Vázquez Lab aims to control these excited states through molecular design to enable current and emerging quantum applications. By integrating design, synthesis, and transient absorption spectroscopy, the ultimate goal is to establish design principles for accessing and manipulating quantum states. Such control also has the potential to advance bioanalytics and sensing, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), photovoltaics (PVs), and other emerging technologies.

Precision in life sciences is fundamentally an analytical chemistry challenge. In biological imaging, sensing, and nanoparticle analysis, current instrument development relies on traditional fluorescent dyes to ‘shed light’ on long-standing biological questions. Additionally, conventional instrumentation is designed for bulk biological analysis. The Vázquez Lab integrates advanced dye design with biological characterization techniques to develop novel methods and instrumentation capable of probing biological nanoparticles at the single-entity level.

It is possible to design organic semiconductors with ionic functionalities as sidechains so that they are water-processable, and applications in the aqueous phase can be explored. Of relevance is that their physico-electrochemical properties can be tuned by external stimuli such as solution identity, temperature, and mechanical force. The Vázquez lab is working on developing such materials, namely Conjugated Oligoelectrolytes (COEs) and Polyelectrolytes (CPEs) for energy transduction applications in the aqueous phase. By combining design, synthesis, and electrochemical methods, novel organic materials are tailored and optimized for their use in bioanalytics, green energy storage, bioelectrosynthesis, and other emerging applications.