Patrick Tapping

Welcome! Here you will find a few photos and bits of information on some of the projects I’ve been working on. Hopefully you’ll find this work as interesting as I do!

Patrick Tapping

My background is in ultrafast laser spectroscopy, physical chemistry, computational chemistry, and computer science. However, my interests are varied and thus have worked in fields as diverse as software engineering, website design, and audio production.

I’ve previously spent four years as an Research Associate in the Department of Chemistry at The University of Adelaide, Australia. This was based in the laser spectroscopy lab under Associate Professor Tak W. Kee. The research group uses ultrafast laser spectroscopy to study how materials absorb light, produce excited states, and transport that energy, with a focus on organic photovoltaic applications.

The highlight of my work was the construction of a two-dimensional electronic spectrometer. This is a high-precision optical device which can observe photophysical phenomena on femtosecond time scales. The build involved all the optics and hardware layout as well as development of the software to drive it and collect and analyse the data. The spectrometer design was published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, and outlined in this post.

I obtained my Ph.D in Chemistry in 2016 with a thesis entitled Theoretical and Spectroscopic Studies of Energy and Charge Transport in Organic Semiconductors, supervised by Tak W. Kee and David M. Huang. Chapters included spectroscopic studies of conjugated polymers, simulations of energy transport through conjugated polymer systems, and quantum mechanical modelling of singlet exciton fission/triplet fusion processes in molecular systems.

My bachelor’s degree majored in chemistry and computer science. I’ve always enjoyed computers and programming, so it’s great that my occupation is able to combine my programming and data analysis skills alongside my scientific knowledge.