IMOD welcomes Gordana Dukovic and David Jonas as member faculty

Dec 10, 2024

The Center for Integration of Modern Optoelectronic Materials on Demand (IMOD), a National Science Foundation (NSF) Science & Technology Center (STC), recently added two new researchers to its core member faculty as of Year 4 of its funding.

Gordana Dukovic and David Jonas, both professors of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and fellows of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI), a joint research institute between CU Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), received IMOD Seed Grants in 2023. Dukovic and Jonas join Seth Marder and Michael Toney as CU Boulder professors on IMOD’s faculty team.

“We’re delighted to formally welcome Gordana and David as full members of the IMOD faculty team,” said David Ginger, IMOD director and the B. Seymour Rabinovitch Endowed Chair in Chemistry at the University of Washington. “With both of these outstanding scientists already demonstrating leadership in collaborative IMOD research, it was an easy decision to double our presence in Boulder, and we’re pleased to have the opportunity to reinforce our relationship with NREL.”

Thanks to IMOD funding, Dukovic will work with Toney, Brandi Cossairt, and Dmitri Talapin to characterize technologically relevant properties of novel nanocrystalline materials developed within IMOD, using advanced electron microscopy and ultrafast spectroscopy methods. Dukovic is a co-author of three recent papers with Cossairt, Talapin, Ginger, Arka Majumdar, and Andrew Rappe, including the Talapin Group’s demonstration of colloidal quantum dot synthesis in molten salt published in Science in October 2024. And earlier this year, Dukovic was one of eight distinguished mid-career faculty named as a 2024 National Brown Investigator by the Brown Institute for Basic Sciences at Caltech.

David Jonas
With IMOD support, Jonas will partner with Cossairt and Majumdar to further develop lead sulfide (PbS) quantum dots for lasers that can be tunably operated in the short-wave infrared telecommunications wavelength range. As well, Jonas, Cossairt, and Majumdar will work to deepen IMOD’s understanding of cadmium selenide (CdSe) “magic clusters” — nanoparticles of a particular size that grants a special property, such as increased stability or perfect molecular homogeneity — which could serve as building blocks of larger nanomaterials for light-emitting applications. Jonas is a co-author of IMOD’s “Design Rules for Obtaining Narrow Luminescence from Semiconductors Made in Solution”, published in Chemical Reviews in June 2023.

Contact Gordana Dukovic at gordana.dukovic@colorado.edu> and David Jonas at David.Jonas@colorado.edu for more information about their work.