Ryszard Jankowiak

Ryszard Jankowiak Ryszard Jankowiak
Professor of Chemistry
Ancillary Professor of Physics
Address: 103 CBC Building
Phone: (785) 532-6785
Lab: (785) 532-1864
Fax: (785) 532-6666
E-mail: ryszard@ksu.edu
Group Webpage
Ph.D. Technical University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland, 1981
M.S. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 1974

Research Area

Photosynthesis Research

We study complex biological systems including photosynthetic reaction centers and photosynthetic antenna pigment complexes of green plants/algae and photosynthetic bacteria using solid-state low temperature (laser-based) spectroscopies, i.e. fluorescence line-narrowing spectroscopy (FLNS), hole-burning spectroscopy (HBS), and single photosynthetic complex spectroscopy (SPCS). The combination of HBS on bulk samples and SPCS is a powerful frequency domain approach for obtaining data that can address a number of issues that are key to understanding excitonic structure and energy transfer dynamics. The long-term goal is to reach a better understanding of the ultrafast solar energy driven primary events of photosynthesis as they occur in higher plants, cyanobacteria, purple bacteria, and green algae and to integrate natural and artificial photosynthetic complexes with molecular photovoltaic devices. A better understanding of the excitation energy transfer (EET) and charge separation (CS) processes taking place in photosynthetic complexes is of great interest, since photosynthetic complexes might offer attractive architectures for a future generation of circuitry in which proteins are organized by a macromolecular scaffold. This type of research is of potential importance for the future design of more efficient solar energy conversion devices.

Recent Selected Publications