We are a group of inventors building instruments for analytical spectroscopy, imaging, and sensing
Just another day in the office - Mackenzie, Marina, Bree, Arthur, Paul, Naomi, Yasi, Monique and Peter
The group welcomes the 2026 cohort of graduate students with a day trip to East Sooke Park. New group members Marina, Bree and Paul may get a distorted view of a typical day in the LaserLab, though.
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Arthur and Swapnil built a sensor system that can transmit sound frequencies using light as a carrier. They showed this can be done over more than 75 km of optical fiber - no amplifiers, no boosters - using a heterodyning method. Read about their work in Journal of Lightwave Technology
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11614399
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Fluorescence EEM setup - a conventional fluorescence emission spectrum - a fluorescence EEM spectrum of the same sample
Sarah, Emma, Travis, and Peter wrote a review on Techniques and instruments for fluorescence excitation-emission matrix spectroscopy. We think you may find it interesting… check it out!
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trac.2026.119025
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Emma Abbey, Doctor of LASERS
Congratulations to Dr. Emma Abbey who defended her PhD dissertation on May 14th, with flying colours! Supported by her labmates, her family and friends she impressed the examining committee with her research on “Fluorescence Excitation Emission Matrix Spectral Imaging (FLEEMSI) Microscopy”
Read moreCavity Enhanced Spectroscopy (CES) is an international meeting that brings together the community of physicists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, and engineers who conduct research in cavity enhanced spectroscopy and its many applications.
Read moreIn these articles (published in Analyst and Soft Matter) we worked with Queen’s researchers Carlos Escobedo and Juan Gomez-Cruz on a new chemical sensor using surface plasmon polaritons. Following earlier work by Escobedo’s group we recorded the “extraordinary optical transmission” through a gold film that has a grid of nanometer-sized holes and monitored its change as the refractive index of an attached polymer film changes. the second article describes a new model for 1-dimensional diffusion kinetics based on the exact integration of Fick’s law.
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Congratulations to Dr Swapnil Daxini, who defended his thesis “Light as a Probe: Harnessing Optical Resonances for Sensing Chemical Diffusion and Mechanical Strain” on December 9th, 2025.
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Monique with her award winning poster at MAF 2025 in Montreal
In week (-2) of her graduate studies Monique Bueno already won an award for her work on Fluorescence Excitation-Emission Matrix Spectroscopy (EEMS) for capillary electrophoresis detection at the 19th International Conference on Methods and Applications in Fluorescence in Montreal.
Congratulations, Monique! We have sky-high expectations for your graduate research..!
Read moreEmma Abbey attended CLEO Europe in June 2025 to present her work on Hadamard Transform fluorescence EEM Imaging.
Read moreAt Science Rendezvous 2025 Emma and Mackenzie showed you how to build your own spectroscope. Click on the image to download the instructions and a cardboard template.
Read moreEmma Abbey presents her work on Fluorescence EEM Imaging at CLEO-2025 in Long Beach. This is the first of two presentations that Emma is going to give this summer. She will travel next to Munich to talk at CLEO-Europe.
Read moreSound recording made with pi-shifted Fiber Bragg Grating as strain sensor.
PhD candidates Swapnil Daxini and Arthur Santos (with early contributions by Dr Deniz Aydin) succeeded in recording sound over 75 km of fiber-optic cable. Their work was published in Optics Express in February 2025.
Read moreDr Adam Bernicky’s work on neural network analysis of flame emission spectra is published as a cover article. This is one of three articles coming from Adam’s PhD thesis.
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Taking a creative break from the lab: Yasi, Monique, Emma, Arthur, Swapnil and Sarah (clockwise)
We love colours in all their forms! Finnerty Gardens is the perfect place for an artistic break to apply our arts-and-crafts skills.
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Screenshot of (not yet Dr.) Adam Bernicky’s opening slide
To no-one’s surprise Adam Bernicky delivered an absolutely stellar defense of his PhD thesis on the analysis of copper concentrates using a custom-built burner and Artificial Neural Network analysis.
Congratulations from all of us.
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Solar Eclipse on April 8, 2024 (photo Dr Travis Ferguson)
Celestial Optics in Action
Our Ontario group members had a first row seat to the solar Eclipse on April 8th,
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Aerial view of the UVic campus
So, you are about to graduate with a B.Sc. in chemistry or physics, and are looking for an exciting research opportunity? Consider applying for one of two graduate student positions in our group! We are a multidisciplinary and diverse team of chemists and physicists, and we are keen to work with you.
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The ground and excited state potential energy curves of an organic molecule forming a TICT state
As part of her MSc research Sara Joulaei-Zonouz (UVic, MSc 2023) studied an organic dye molecule that was designed to exhibit an enormous solvatochromic shift from a twisted excited state geometry - these excited states are called Twisted Internal Charge Transfer (TICT) states. While the molecule behaved experimentally as it should (we checked!), Sara found out - through a lot of ab initio calculations - that it does all this without actually forming a TICT state. A real twist in that story..!
Read more at the New Journal of Chemistry.
Read moreFor the first time the LaserLab group has had two articles accepted on the same day! Both are in ACS Analytical Chemistry and both are on the use of our fully-programmable, broadband light source for highly multiplexed fluorescence spectroscopy.
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Beach Day 2023
The LaserLab appreciates photons, waves, and silicates in all forms!
Spending a day at the beach in East Sooke Park was a reminder that there is life outside the lab.
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