CHESTERTOWN, MD—J.D. Tovar, professor in the Chemistry Department at Johns Hopkins University, will speak on “ Controlling energy migration through ‘plastic’ organic electronic materials” at Washington College on Monday, October 22 at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, Toll Science Center. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the Washington College Chemistry Department as part of National Chemistry Week.

Tovar joined the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in 2005. His current research focuses on charge transport through synthetically complex organic materials, with interests in small molecule, polymeric and bioelectronic supramolecular systems.

He completed his undergraduate training in chemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he performed research with Julius Glater and Menachem Elimelech in Civil Engineering and later with Yves Rubin in Chemistry.  He then moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pursue a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. There, he  worked for Timothy M. Swager and developed his thesis on the development of new synthetic methods to construct large thiophene-based polycyclic aromatics.

Before joining Hopkins, he was a Baxter Postdoctoral Fellow in the labs of Samuel I. Stupp and Mark C. Hersam at Northwestern University, where he researched self-assembling biomaterials with useful electrical properties.