Dr. Naomi Ginsberg, an assistant professor of Chemistry and Physics at UC Berkeley, has joined PBD as a Faculty Scientist. Ginsberg received her B. A. Sc. in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto in 2000 and earned a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard in 2007. She was a Glenn T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lab from 2007 through 2010, working with the Fleming group. She received the DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2012 and was a Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering in 2011. She was also the Cupola Era Endowed Chair in the College of Chemistry from 2010-2012.
Ginsberg’s research emphasis includes physical and biophysical chemistry as well as light harvesting, spectroscopy, and imaging. Her group focuses on visualizing ultrafast energy flow in natural and artificial light harvesting systems and on combining electron and optical microscopies to facilitate high-resolution studies of living things and molecular interactions in solution.
The Ginsberg group uses multiple approaches, separately and in combination, including ultrafast spectroscopy, light microscopy, and cathodoluminescence electron microscopy. A common theme is to deeply understand the nature of the light-matter interactions being used in order to optimally measure these complex dynamics..
Current projects aim to (1) map spatio-temporal photoexcitation trajectories onto the architecture of natural and artificial photosynthetic light harvesters by adapting fluorescence microscopy to time-resolve ultrafast energy flow, and (2) to develop near-field optical microscopies by leveraging the high spatial resolution of electron optics and the spectral selectivity of cathodoluminescence in order to study photosynthetic membrane reorganization under physiological conditions.
