Barr, Kristopher

Dr.Kristopher Barr was born and raised in Southern California. He received his associate’s degree in 2010 from Orange Coast College then continued his undergraduate studies at UC Irvine where he completed his bachelor’s degree with honors in Chemistry.

At UCLA, Kristopher completed his Master’s and PhD under the supervision of Dr. Paul S. Weiss. His work focused primarily on designing and constructing an infrared scanning tunneling microscope with the capability of measuring the vibrational modes at the nanoscale, enabling researchers to probe the chemistry on surfaces at the scale of molecules.

As a 2020-21 Libby Teacher-Scholar, Kristopher will start by bringing his expertise of studying surface science to help answer questions about the effects of chirality on the propagation of electrons with different spin polarizations utilizing photon scanning tunneling microscopy with Dr. Paul S. Weiss.

Education and teaching were also important to Kristopher and in 2016 he earned the Hanson-Dow Excellence in Teaching award. Afterwards, he became involved with the teaching assistant (TA) training program where he helped remodel the Chemistry Departments’ TA training course and earned a certification as a Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL) Scholar by designing and implementing an experiment that explored the effect of how modeling active-learning lessons in laboratories can help TAs feel more empowered to affect student learning.

In his first year, Kristopher will be teaching General Chemistry lectures (Chem 20B) as well as Quantum Chemistry (Chem 113A).