Materials Research Fellow

Jeffrey Gorman @ Durham University, Dept. Chemistry

Harnessing Biology to Accelerate Quantum Materials Discovery

What I Do

I combine three disciplines to unlock biology’s potential for materials chemistry:

Synthetic Organic Chemistry – Design and synthesise new semiconductor building blocks
DNA Nanotechnology – Program biological assembly to create precise molecular architectures
Ultrafast Spectroscopy – Measure quantum properties at the nanoscale

This unique combination lets me explore vast chemical space rapidly, identifying the next generation of materials for quantum sensors, LEDs, photovoltaics, and quantum information systems.

By programming DNA to assemble organic semiconductors with nanometer precision, I can create libraries of thousands of quantum materials in parallel—accelerating discovery by a million-fold compared to traditional methods.