Elliot J. Taffet

B.A. Columbia University (2014), Ph.D. Princeton University (2019), P.D.R.A. Stanford University (2021)

Principal Research Interests: 

My philosophy is that we learn deeply and inclusively when we distill a single topic down to its most fundamental elements so that everyone is on the same page before we switch topics. I strive to hold an interactive classroom that is student-centered and emphasizes critical thinking centered on forging connections between chemistry concepts to build a comprehensive picture. To me, teaching students how to think through sharpening skills that support higher-level thinking is most important. I regard student engagement as the key metric of teaching effectiveness--any question or initiative taken by a student is a victory in my eyes. Even the simplest question of "I don't know where to start" enables me to widen a student's mind and provide a spark so that students can seize this moment to take command of their own education.

I am excited by the opportunity to change the paradigm of computer simulations from molecular to macromolecular scales. Propelling the pursuit of this "holy grail" in computational chemistry are advancements in cutting-edge graphics and quantum processing units on top of the canonical CPU. These breakthroughs in computational hardware to make the dimensionally prohibitive tractable--otherwise known as getting the work done--have been complemented by the scintillating advancements in disentangling what this work means, and how to build off of it, through machine learning. This dream pairing has led me to become fascinated with scale-invariant quantum dynamics and the quantum cooperativity encoding biological functionality of multiscale assemblies in response to light. Understanding how the signal from light activates mechanisms relevant to the electron-transport chain in photosynthesis and transforms through toying with spin--the multiplicative mechanisms of singlet fission and delayed fluorescence--are next-generation aims where fleshing out physical insight is a tantalizing challenge. Broadly speaking, I am interested in modeling the dynamics of the dance of disordered proteins and mesoscale environments from the perspective of light-matter interactions.