URSI: Undergraduate Research Summer Institute - Vassar College

40th anniversary of the amazing URSI Program

Chemistry's Tyr Melligan, Sydney Goldsmith and Professor Leah Bendavid

Images of a slab of TiO2 (specifically TiO2 rutile (110)), a key part of a dye-sensitized solar cell. In short, boronic acids look to be promising anchoring groups for dye molecules on TiO2 rutile surfaces, and our goal is to see how they bind to defects in the TiO2 crystal structure. Thus, one of the first things we did was build a computer model of a slab that had a defect (a missing oxygen atom), and this is what you see in the photos. The first photo shows a side view of the slab, while the second shows a bird’s-eye view of just the top layer of the crystal structure.

URSI 2026

Professor Teitsworth from Chemistry URSI students:
Hershey Pothuganti, Chris Rhee, and Querida Alleyne are collecting spectroscopic data from semiconductor films.

***URSI 2026 40th Anniversary *** 93 students