Wu, Eric

Eric C. Wu received his B.S. in Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. As an undergraduate, he performed undergraduate research in Professor Andrew Streitwieser’s lab and Professor Richard J. Saykally’s lab.  In the Streitwieser lab, he studied the kinetic and equilibrium lithium acidities of arenes and substituted arenes using computational chemistry.  In the Saykally lab, he probed ions at liquid interfaces using sum frequency generation and second harmonic generation.  After graduating from Berkeley, he received his Ph.D. degree in Physical chemistry and Computational Chemistry in 2017.  Under the direction of Professor Linda A. Peteanu and Professor Hyung J. Kim, he studied the structural and dynamic heterogeneities in ionic liquids using molecular dynamic simulation and fluorescence correlation spectroscopy. 

After receiving his Ph.D., he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley for three years under the direction of Professor Graham R. Fleming.  In the Fleming lab, he studied the relaxation of triphenylmethane dyes and the energy transfer in photosynthetic reaction centers using two-dimensional electronic-vibrational spectroscopy.  In the Fleming lab, he also helped build a spectrometer that uses entangled photons.  Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA under the direction of Professor Benjamin J. Schwartz.  He studies the dynamics of solvated electrons using transient absorption spectroscopy and the thermodynamics of doped conjugated polymers using simulations.  Starting the Winter 2021 quarter, he is teaching physical chemistry.