Stéphane Petoud

 

Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry

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412-624-8210, 8611(fax)
spetoud@pitt.edu

http://www.chem.pitt.edu/petoud

  

 

Stéphane Petoud’s research focuses on the development of luminescent lanthanide compounds using a nanoscale approach. Lanthanide metal ions have several advantageous photophysical properties over organic fluorophores that are useful for applications such as biological imagery and optical displays due to their long luminescence lifetimes, sharp emission bands and strong resistance to photobleaching.  In order to obtain the luminescence properties, their electronic levels need to be populated through appropriate sensitizers that need to absorb as much light as possible and convert the resulting energy to the luminescent lanthanide cations.  This group is developing (design, synthesis, study and test in practical applications) two novel sensitization strategies based on this nanoscale approach: 1) lanthanide doped semi-conductor nanocrystals and 2) polymetallic dendrimer lanthanide complexes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Left) High resolution transmission electron microscopy of a luminescent terbium doped nanocrystal synthesized and studied in our research group.  (Right) Schematic representation of a polymetallic lanthanide complex formed with a dendrimer ligand.