Recent Group News
April 5, 2009
Undergraduate Student Leah Dodson Receives a SOURCE Summer Research Fellowship Again
Leah received a summer research award from the SOURCE (Support of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors) Summer Program. This is the second year that Leah received this summer research award (see News from April 30, 2008 below). She presented her work at recent poster sessions, including the 2009 CeRMACS Undergraduate Poster session and Intersections, a Case undergraduate poster session.
April 2, 2009
Do-Yong Kim is accepted in a Ph.D. graduate program in Chemistry
Congratulations to Kim for his admittance to the Ph.D. graduate program in Chemistry at Texas A&M University. The Crespo Group wishes you all the best in your professional career.
January 30, 2009
The Crespo Group Receives Funding from the Department of Defense
In response to the U. S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center BAA, Dr. Crespo is awarded with a contract to study the interaction of nitrogen-rich compounds with DNA and amino acids components. Congratulations to the students involved in this research project.
January 1, 2009
The Crespo Group is awarded with the ACS PRF New Investigator Research Grant
The Board of Directors of the American Chemical Society has approved the recommendation of The ACS Petroleum Research Fund Advisory Board that Dr. Crespo receive a Petroleum Research Fund for the period 1/1/2009 through 8/31/2011 to support the group research efforts in the “Photochemistry of Environmentally Relevant Nitro-Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons”. Congratulations to those directly involved in this research project.
December 22, 2008
Graduate Student Chengwei Wen joins the Crespo Research Group
Welcome to the group, Chengwei. We wish you every success in your graduate education.
November 18, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in Journal of Physical Chemistry A
In collaboration with Prof. David Close at East Tennessee State University and Profs. Jerzy Leszczynski and Leonid Gorb at Jackson State University, Dr. Crespo performed quantum chemical calculations to estimate the ionization energy thresholds of microhydrated adenine and its tautomers. See the full story here.
October 31, 2008
Graduate Student Aaron R. Vogt successfully completed the Oral Qualifying Examination requirements for the Ph.D. degree
Congratulations Aaron and best wishes for continued sucess in your graduate studies.
July 23, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in Journal of the American Chemical Society
In collaboration with Prof. Bern Kohler and his group at The Ohio State University, Dr. Crespo uses transient absorption spectroscopy with femtosecond time resolution to show that excited state in double-stranded oligonucleotides containing G·C base pairs relax to the electronic ground state about 10 times more slowly in the duplexes and hairpins on average than in the individual mononucleotides of G and C. Detection of long-lived excited states in G•C oligonucleotides complements the earlier observation of slow ground-state recovery in A•T DNA (view here), showing that excited states with picosecond lifetimes are formed in DNAs containing either kind of base pair. The results show further that Watson-Crick G•C base pairs in these base-paired and base-stacked duplexes do not enable subpicosecond relaxation to the electronic ground state. A model is proposed in which fluorescent exciton states decay rapidly and irreversibly to dark exciplex states. This model explains the seemingly contradictory observations of femtosecond fluorescence and slower, picosecond recovery of the ground-state population. See the full story here.
July 22, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
In collaboration with Prof. Bern Kohler and his group at The Ohio State University, Dr. Crespo uses transient absorption spectroscopy with femtosecond time resolution to measure the formation of high yields of exciplex states between stacked DNA and RNA bases. The decay rates of the long-lived, exciplex states decrease with increasing energy of the charge-transfer state produced by transferring an electron from one base to another. Results with adenine oligonucleotides of different length (two, four and hundreds of adenine bases) further indicate that excited states localized on a stack of just two bases are the common trap states independent of the number of stacked nucleotides. A kinetic model is developed in which excitations associated with two stacked bases decay to exciplex states, whereas excitations in unstacked bases decay via ultrafast internal conversion. These results establish the importance of charge transfer quenching pathways for UV-irradiated RNA and DNA in room-temperature solution. See the full story here.
June 17, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A
The Crespo Group studies the photochemical fate of many pollutants, including 1-nitropyrene, and recently published a paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A. See the full story here.
April 30, 2008
Graduate Student Aaron Vogt Wins Award
Aaron received the Graduate Teaching Award at the 2008 Chemistry Department awards ceremony.
Undergraduate Student Leah Dodson Wins Award and Summer Research Fellowship
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Leah received the Analytical Chemistry Award at the 2008 Chemistry Department awards ceremony. To finish out the year, Leah was also accepted into the SOURCE (Support of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors) Summer Scholars program. This program provides the funds necessary for undergraduate students to complete research during the summer under faculty advisors.
Visit the SOURCE website
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April 17, 2008
Aaron Vogt Presents Poster at 2008 Research ShowCase
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Aaron represented the Crespo Group on April 17, 2008 at CWRU's Research ShowCase. His poster "Light-Induced Degradation of Nitro-Aromatic Pollutants in the Environment" represented his first year here at Case.
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April 11, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry A (Letters)
In collaboration with David Close at East Tennessee State University and Jerzy Leszczynski and Leonid Gorb at Jackson State University, Dr. Crespo uses computational chemistry tools to elucidate controversial experimental results on the vertical ionization energy of micro-hydrated thymine. See the full story here.
January 11, 2008
Dr. Crespo Publishes Paper in Biophysical Journal
In collaboration with Bern Kohler and his group at The Ohio State University, Dr. Crespo uses molecular dynamics simulation to predict the photo-dimerization yield of thymine dinucleotides in various aqueous co-solvent mixtures. The results agree well with the experimental yields, suggesting that a simple two-parameter model is able to capture the major conformational features controlling the thymine dimer formation in DNA. See the full story here.
November 2007
Dr. Crespo Featured in CienciaPR
Dr. Crespo was spotlighted by CienciaPR a Puerto Rican scientific newsletter this November. Learn more by clicking on the CienciaPR link located in the Related Sites section.
October 2007
Dr. Crespo Awarded Funding
Dr. Crespo was awarded financial support from the National Science Foundation, Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (NSF ACES) Program. Check out the NSF ACES website here.
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