Biography.
Dr. Matthew Bain
Matt grew up playing rugby in Mintlaw on the north east coast of Scotland. He studied for a Master’s in Chemistry at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh with a final year project supervised by Ken McKendrick who he credits with introducing him to the wonderful world of chemical dynamics.
Following this Matt moved to the University of Bristol where he worked towards a PhD supervised by Mike Ashfold, during which Matt developed a novel imaging experiment to quantify the relative probabilities of different bonds breaking following photoexcitation in small isolated molecules.
Having taken his fill of rainy British weather, he moved to Los Angeles to work in the Bradforth group where he is focused on expanding transient absorption spectroscopy to the hundreds of kilohertz regime as a means of rapidly screening potential excited state synthetic chemical reactions and exploring the photochemistry of biologically relevant systems.
Outside of the lab, Matt is obsessed with guitar playing, even buying his beloved Martin OM-28 its own seat on the plane to California.