2000 IOTA SIGMA PI ANNA LOUISE HOFFMAN AWARD FOR
OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN GRADUATE RESEARCH

Laura Kaufman, University of California

Laura’s thesis project concerns the development of multidimensional spectroscopies, specifically two-dimensional Raman spectroscopy and two-dimensional photon echo spectroscopy for the study of dynamics and structure in complex systems. Dr. Graham Fleming, Laura’s nominator commented that “in looking back over 21 years of advising graduate students at the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, Laura stands out as being exceptional. She is a rare combination of a remarkable intellectual and a determined and resourceful experimentalist.” Laura joined the Fleming group at the time when researchers at Berkeley, in Japan and the Netherlands realized that the multidimensional Raman experiment they were carrying out was fatally compromised by an interfering signal. Working with postdoc David Blank, Laura developed a formal strategy to select the desired signal and discriminate against the much stronger interfering signals, carried through the excruciatingly complex calculations to define the required experimental configuration, found it and set up the experiment. Working together, they got a preliminary data set that gave the first real 2D Raman signals. Then working alone, Laura confirmed the new result and went on to collect a full set of all the tensor components of the 2D signal over the Christmas period! Laura also independently carried out the first 2-D fifth -order photon echo measurements for dye molecules in solution. Dr. Fleming stated that he has very few if any students or postdocs who could have done the experiment at Laura’s stage despite the fact that his former students and postdocs are now on the faculties of Cornell, Harvard, MIT, University of Chicago, and at least ten other major US universities. According to her teaching supervisor, Dr. Robert Harris, Laura is also a superb TA. She was able to clearly explicate the material covered in the graduate quantum mechanics course to the class of students with unusually varied backgrounds. Often, she presented derivations and analyses which differed from Dr. Harris’ and also suggested excellent problems for the problem sets and the exam which were adopted by Dr. Harris. Laura has published her research in journals like the Journal of Chemical Physics and in presentations at the American Physical Society.  

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