At Stanford, he developed 2D Infrared spectroscopy as an approach to examine hydrogen bond dynamics in liquid water, which led to new understanding of fast dynamics and energy relaxation processes in aqueous environments. In his PhD work at Emory University, he reported the first measurements of the competition between hot excited state electron transfer versus electronic and vibrational cooling of excited molecules adsorbed onto metal oxide semiconductors used in dye sensitized solar cells and photoelectrochemical cells, leading to new insight about the primary events leading to charge transfer in these systems.