Horizon Lectures

I gave a talk for The Horizon Lectures, the international physics seminar series of the BS Physics program at the University of Northern Philippines (UNP). The series brings researchers from abroad to UNP’s students, faculty, and prospective high school STEM students through online sessions. Its aim is to make frontier science feel close and within reach.

My talk was entitled “Molecular Chirality: From the Building Blocks of Life to Electron Spin”. Each talk in the series opens with a Career & Journey segment before the research, because the path to a career in academia is equally important as the research itself. I started with mine: a BS, MS, and PhD in Physics at UP Diliman, then a postdoc at the Max Born Institute in Berlin. None of those steps were planned far ahead, and I wanted the students to see that a career in physics is built one step at a time.

I then walked the students from the everyday idea of handedness to the questions we work on in my current research. What does chirality mean, and why is it important? What is photoionization, and why we study it? What happens when you photoionize chiral molecules? What is electron spin? Together, these led up to the central idea of my work, the enantio-sensitive molecular compass: a way in which a molecule’s handedness shows up as a direction that light and electrons can “read.”

The audience was a mix of high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. Thank you to the UNP BS Physics program for the invitation and for building a series that I hope will inspire many future Filipino physicists.