Moore Foundation Backs Boston University Chemist to Probe Light and Matter at the Nanoscale

Individual molecules operate on a scale that strains human intuition. A single molecule measures roughly one nanometer across—one-billionth of a meter. To put that in perspective, a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometers thick, and the head of a pin spans roughly 1,000,000 nanometers. At that scale, the familiar rules of bulk materials give way to quantum mechanics, and the way a molecule absorbs, emits, or transfers energy can depend on the precise position of a single atom. It is precisely this hidden world, and especially the interfaces where molecules meet and interact, that Boston University researcher Maria (Masha) Kamenetska has spent her career learning to see and to manipulate. Now her work has earned one of the most competitive honors in American experimental physics.

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has named Kamenetska, an associate professor of chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering at Boston University, to its 2026 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators. The foundation describes the program as supporting a distinguished group of mid-career researchers pushing the boundaries of experimental physics, and the recognition comes with substantial practical weight: $1.35 million in research funding. Kamenetska was one of 21 investigators selected in the 2026 round, a cohort drawn from institutions across the United States. The foundation itself was established in 2000 by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore, the author of the famous observation about the exponential growth of computing power that became known as Moore’s Law, and his wife Betty, and it has since become one of the most influential private backers of basic science in the country.

Kamenetska’s laboratory occupies an unusual position at the intersection of three disciplines. Trained in experimental physics but holding appointments in chemistry, physics, and materials science and engineering, she approaches molecules the way an engineer approaches a machine: as objects whose parts can be measured, tested, and ultimately controlled. Her research focuses on the intermolecular interface—the region where two molecules meet, exchange electrons, and transmit energy. These junctions are the critical points in molecular electronics, in the energy-transfer cascades of photosynthesis, in the chemical reactions that power living cells, and in the sensors that convert molecular binding events into measurable signals. Understanding what happens at these meeting points, she argues, is fundamental to building both better devices and better diagnostics.

The technical challenge is formidable. A single molecular junction is far too small to image with conventional light microscopy, because visible light has wavelengths hundreds of times larger than the object being studied. Researchers in this field therefore rely on indirect electrical measurements, scanning probe techniques, and increasingly on optical methods that exploit the quantum properties of light itself. Kamenetska’s group has built a reputation for designing new instruments and measurement schemes that combine these approaches, allowing them to correlate the structure of a molecular junction with its electronic and optical behavior. That combination—synthesizing molecules, wiring them into circuits or suspending them between electrodes, and then interrogating them with light—requires expertise that few laboratories possess under one roof.

With the Moore Foundation support, Kamenetska and her team plan to push their measurements into a new regime using ultrafast laser spectroscopy. The technique relies on laser pulses that last femtoseconds—quadrillionths of a second—brief enough to capture the motion of electrons and the vibrations of chemical bonds as they happen. By firing sequences of these ultrashort pulses at nanoscale systems and recording how the material responds, researchers can reconstruct the choreography of energy flow: how a photon’s energy is absorbed, how it migrates through a molecule or across an interface, and how it is ultimately converted into heat, charge, or emitted light. Applied to single molecules and molecular junctions, this approach promises to reveal interactions between light and matter at a level of detail that has remained out of reach.

The potential applications extend well beyond the laboratory bench. Kamenetska notes that the interaction of light and matter on the nanoscale forms the foundation of modern electronics and other emerging technologies. Better control over these interactions could sharpen the resolution of imaging systems, enable sensors capable of detecting individual molecules in biological samples, and contribute to the development of quantum technologies, where the coherent manipulation of single quantum systems is the essential requirement. In biological diagnostics, for example, a technique that can read out the optical response of a single molecule bound to a target could allow earlier and more sensitive detection of disease markers than current methods, which rely on amplifying signals from large numbers of molecules.

Such ambition carries real scientific risk, and Kamenetska is candid about it. The experiments her team plans have never been done before, she says, and the outcome is not certain. This is precisely the kind of high-risk, high-reward research that the Moore Foundation’s investigator program is designed to support. Unlike conventional federal grants, which often favor projects with predictable outcomes and detailed preliminary data, the investigator awards are intended to give established researchers the freedom to take chances on ideas that might fail but that could open entirely new fields if they succeed. For Kamenetska, that freedom is the most valuable part of the award. It is inspiring, she says, to have a foundation take a chance on her ideas and to have an opportunity to make them real in the lab, allowing her team to develop new expertise and to think in new creative ways.

The funding will also have an impact on the people doing the work. Kamenetska plans to expand training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students at the forefront of modern quantum optics and materials research. Her laboratory operates on a deliberately convergent model, drawing on tools and expertise from experimental physics, synthetic chemistry, computational chemistry, and materials processing. Students in the group learn to design and synthesize molecules, to build and align laser systems, to model quantum processes computationally, and to fabricate and characterize nanoscale devices. That breadth of training is increasingly seen as essential for scientists entering fields where the boundaries between physics, chemistry, and engineering are dissolving, and it is a model that awards like this one help sustain.

Kamenetska is emphatic that the recognition belongs as much to her students as to herself. She says she would not be able to do this work without the amazing graduate and undergraduate students in her lab, and describes the award as, in many ways, a recognition of their work and of what it has allowed her to imagine her laboratory can do. She also hopes the award draws attention to a broader structural issue: the critical importance of supporting fundamental science research and maintaining fundamental science departments such as physics and chemistry, which she describes as the backbone of many disciplines and the magnet that draws bright young people to universities, enabling this kind of research in the first place.

As one of 21 investigators in the 2026 cohort, Kamenetska joins a community of researchers whose work spans condensed matter physics, quantum information, optics, and biophysics. The program’s philosophy is that progress in experimental physics often comes not from theory alone but from the patient, inventive work of building instruments capable of asking questions no one has asked before. For a laboratory that builds its own tools to watch single molecules interact with light, a five-year commitment of this kind is more than financial support. It is a license to attempt the experiments that have never been done, in the knowledge that even the failures will teach something new about the smallest interfaces in nature—and that the successes could reshape how we image, sense, and engineer the world at the nanometer scale.

Subject of Research: Nanoscale light-matter interactions and single-molecule spectroscopy

Article Title: Boston University researcher wins Moore Foundation Award to push “boundaries of experimental physics”

Article References: Boston University researcher wins Moore Foundation Award to push “boundaries of experimental physics”. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

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Keywords: Maria Kamenetska, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Experimental Physics Investigators, ultrafast laser spectroscopy, nanoscale, single molecules, molecular junctions, quantum technology, biological diagnostics, Boston University, quantum optics, fundamental science funding