José L. Godínez Castellanos is a 2025-2026 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Chemistry working with Professor. Naomi S. Ginsberg. José’s current work revolves around understanding charge carrier and thermal transport, and their interconversion in solid state doped silver selenide thermoelectrics. He uses stroboscopic interferometric scattering to provide a spatially- and time-resolved perspective of energy transport in these materials. This approach offers a new framework where we probe a material’s intrinsic properties and the effect of mesoscale structure in thermal transport—helping chemists understand the effects of dopants and design high-efficiency thermoelectrics.
José’s PhD work explored different structural effects (e.g., sequence, conformers, chromatin region location) that modulate the ultrafast formation of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers in DNA after absorption of UV light. José received a PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Southern California, and a B.S. in Chemistry from the California State University, Stanislaus.