ACS– New Haven Section Speaker Series

Brett McGuire received his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009 and his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 2014.  He was a National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) Jansky Fellow and then a NASA Hubble Fellow from 2014-2020 at the NRAO and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.  In 2020, he started a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is now an Associate Professor of Chemistry. Research in the McGuire Group uses the tools of physical chemistry, molecular spectroscopy, and observational astrophysics to understand how the chemical ingredients for life evolve with and help shape the formation of stars and planets. 

Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), a class of large hydrocarbon molecules, are thought to sequester a large fraction (10-25%) of all carbon in the Universe.  While strong circumstantial evidence for their presence in space has existed since the 1980s, it is only in the last few years that the first individual PAH species have been definitively detected. In this talk, I'll describe the synthetic and spectroscopic laboratory work, computational approaches, and observational efforts which have led to these discoveries, discuss our current understanding of the formation and molecular evolution of PAHs in space, and describe the growing body of evidence that these species, in no small part, influence the inventory of raw organic material delivered to early planets.  I'll conclude by taking a critical look at open questions related to PAH chemistry in space and the prospects for the field going forward.