About

Hello there! I am Dmitry Baranov, a tenure-track BUL (Biträdande Universitetslektor in Swedish, equivalent to Assistant Professor) at the Division of Chemical Physics at Lund University in Lund, Sweden.

I got my education and early training in chemistry in Russia (B.Sc. 2008, Mendeleev University of Chemical Technology of Russia). Early involvement in academic research was one of the requirements at my department (Higher Chemical College of the Russian Academy of Sciences), which I took to heart by joining a laboratory of Chemistry of Nanomaterials at the Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry in Moscow (Prof. Sergey Gubin, Dr. Gleb Yurkov) working on magnetic nanoparticles and their composites with organic polymers. 

Organometallic and cluster chemistry were Prof. Gubin's background [Nesmeyanov's school, authored Chemistry of Clusters (in Russian only)]; thus, a view of nanocrystals as inorganic macromolecules was a natural perspective for me to absorb. As an undergraduate student, I was lucky to spend a few summers in the US (with Prof. Shouheng Sun in 2006 and Prof. Ekaterina Kadnikova in 2008) and Germany (with Prof. Michael Giersig in 2007) working on magnetic nanoparticles (Co, Fe, SmCo5, FePt, FePt@SiO2) and surface chemistry of gold colloids (functionalizing them azide thiols for click-chemistry), learning about different cultures and the burgeoning field of nanochemistry.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I encountered colloidal semiconductor quantum dots, rods, and tetrapods at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory in Lecce, Italy, in my first collaboration with Prof. Manna. I got fascinated by a luminescent rainbow of CdSe nanocrystals and their property to organize themselves into close-packed solids through the balancing act of attractive and repulsive forces known under the umbrella term self-assembly.

The next chapter was graduate school, which I pursued at the University of Chicago (M.Sc. 2011, with Prof. Dmitri Talapin) and the University of Colorado Boulder (Ph.D. 2017, with Prof. David Jonas). Working with Prof. Jonas allowed me to study physical chemistry and optical spectroscopy, so I could figure out why and where the luminescent rainbows and assembly forces are coming from.

In grad school, I experimented with femtosecond laser pulses to probe the electronic structure of lead sulfide nanocrystals, which are promising materials for applications in photovoltaics and infrared technologies. You can read more about it in the doctoral dissertation "Synthesis of Lead Sulfide Nanocrystals and Their Two-Dimensional Electronic Spectra in a Spinning Cell." 

After the Ph.D., I spent five productive years at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova, Italy, working with Prof. Manna at the Nanochemistry Department. It is there I had an opportunity to immerse myself in the research of colloidal perovskite nanocrystals.

The three ropes - nanochemistry, self-assembly, and spectroscopy brought me to my current research about the collective properties of light-emitting nanocrystals. When I am not in the lab or behind a laptop, I enjoy watching movies, reading books, and playing ultimate frisbee with Akka in Lund (Sweden) or Basilisks in Genova (Italy).