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Departmental Colloquium - Shedding New Light on Photosynthesis

Date

Friday November 28, 2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

STI A

Jennifer Ogilvie,
University of Ottawa

 

Abstract

Living organisms are much more than the sum of their parts and understanding how they work requires studying them over a vast range of time and length scales. Photosynthesis beautifully illustrates the challenges inherent in studying biological systems: on a femtosecond to picosecond time scale, light energy absorbed by a photosynthetic antenna complex is transferred through a maze of antennas to a “reaction center” where it is stored as stable charge separation that fuels the downstream processes of biomass production. While an isolated chlorophyll pigment will absorb sunlight, a photosynthetic complex achieves entirely new functionality through exquisite control of the local pigment environment and the relative spacing and orientation of the constituent pigments, tailoring the energy landscape to orchestrate, in time and space, the energy transfer and charge separation events that underlie photosynthesis. To capture the fastest dynamical processes in biology, multidimensional coherent spectroscopies provide the ability to initiate synchronized biological function in an ensemble of molecules, and monitor, with exquisite time resolution, the system evolution via its response to a carefully timed sequence of laser pulses. I will demonstrate how multidimensional spectroscopies can address open questions about photosynthetic systems and describe our recent progress in developing and using these tools to probe the mechanisms of ultrafast energy conversion in natural and artificial photosynthetic systems.

Jennifer P. Ogilvie is a Professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. She received her B.Sc. from the University of Waterloo, her M.Sc. degree from Simon Fraser University, Canada, and her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Toronto, Canada. She was an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory for Optics and Biosciences at the Ecole Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. She began her independent career at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and moved to the University of Ottawa in 2024. Ogilvie’s group develops coherent multidimensional spectroscopies and imaging methods and applies them to a wide range of biological and condensed phase systems. She is a Sloan Fellow and an Optica Fellow.

 

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium.

 

 

Departmental Colloquium - Do Nearby Habitable-World Candidates Have an Atmosphere ? 

Date

Friday November 21, 2025
1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

STI A

Rene Doyon,
University of Montreal

 

Abstract

Small, temperate, rocky planets around low-mass stars are now known to be abundant in the solar neighborhood. Current occurrence-rate estimates indicate that a significant fraction (15– 50%) of M dwarfs host at least one planet in the habitable zone, raising the exciting possibility that a fraction of these worlds possess atmospheres and surface conditions suitable for liquid water. Among them, transiting systems are for now the easiest to study. Only a handful meet the stringent criteria of habitable-world candidates, that is planets in the habitable zone with precisely measured masses and radii, enabling detailed internal-structure models and constraints on their possible water inventories. The James Webb Space Telescope offers, for the first time, the capability to determine whether such planets retain an atmosphere through transmission spectroscopy and thermal-emission photometry, and to probe its composition if present. In this seminar, I will briefly highlight the current status of JWST observations of nearby rocky planets, along with essential complementary contributions from ground-based high-resolution spectroscopy, notably SPIRou and NIRPS. I will conclude with a perspective on the next major step: the characterization of nearby non-transiting habitable worlds with the European Extremely Large Telescope, poised to transform the exoplanet field in the next decade.

 

 

Timbits, coffee, tea will be served in STI A before the colloquium.

 

 

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