Danielle Tokarz
Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Saint Mary’s University
Danielle Tokarz, PhD
Email: Danielle.tokarz@smu.ca
Assistant Professor of Chemistry, Saint Mary’s University
Web: https://danielletokarz.wixsite.com/tokarzlab
I am an experimental scientist interested in the interactions between focused ultrafast pulsed lasers and interesting synthetic and biological nanomaterials in order to obtain quantitative structural information on different aspects of the structure, to enhance the understanding of related structure-function phenomena, to find new useful nonlinearly active synthetic or biological materials, and to extend the utility of nonlinear optical microscopy as an industrial and medical diagnostic tool.
Research Group
I have an undergraduate degree in chemistry, but during my Ph.D., I studied in a biophysics laser microscopy laboratory, and during my postdoctoral fellowship, I worked in a biomedical engineering group, so like me, my research group is very interdisciplinary. Therefore, I’m interested to work with students that have a strong desire to learn and explore, and that have a background in any of the following fields, (more than one is preferred but not required): Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Pharmacology, Computer Science, and Mathematics. If you are interested please contact me via email with a letter of interest.
Projects
We manipulate and condition ultrafast near-IR lasers, and we build and design nonlinear spectroscopy and microscopy instrumentation. We dissect or isolate biological structures of interest, or sometimes we image them whole! We measure structure-function relationships of microscopic nano and micro-scale synthetic or biological materials, such as nanowires or organ tissues. We synthesize nonlinear optically active synthetic or biological nanostructures for the development of informative microscopic tissue labels. We also perform analytical measurements of nonlinear optical properties of molecules and proteins. Please refer to my research website (https://danielletokarz.wixsite.com/tokarzlab) for a list of recent projects, pictures of the laser laboratory, and an updated list of publications.