The group's research activities are directed towards three interrelated areas: energy transduction in biological systems; interfacial structure and reaction dynamics; and high-order nonlinear laser spectroscopies (six-wave mixing) as a novel probe of liquid and protein "memory" functions.

With respect to energy transduction the question being addressed is the mechanism by which small amounts of energy can be so highly directed in executing biological functions. Biomolecules are huge, bordering on the mesoscopic scale, with typically more than 105 degrees of freedom; yet the act of a single bond being made or broken can lead to correlated motions involving all the constituent atoms on time scales many orders of magnitude faster than a random sampling of its degrees of freedom. How is this relatively small amount of energy so highly directed into functionally relevant motions?