Thomas la Cour Jansen received his PhD with the late professor Jaap Snijders in 2002 from the Theoretical Chemistry group at the University of Groningen. He did a post doc. with professor Shaul Mukamel, first at the University of Rochester and later at the University of California at Irvine. In 2005, Thomas la Cour Jansen returned to Groningen on a VENI fellowship to develop methods for studying peptide structure and dynamics. In 2007, he was awarded the VIDI fellowship to study two-dimensional spectroscopy of proteins. From 2010, he became a permanent staff member at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials working on Computational Spectroscopy. In 2021, he was promoted to associate professor and in 2022 he became chair of the Theory of Condensed Matter group. The group is one of the founding groups of the Berendsen Center for Multiscale Modeling and Material Design. The research of Thomas la Cour Jansen focus on unraveling structural and functional properties of natural and artificial systems using computational spectroscopy approaches in strong collaboration with experimental groups. The applications include a broad range of materials from proteins over photosynthetic antenna systems to perovskite solar cells. For this research, the group develops its own software packages, which are also made available to the research community. Appart from personal grants as mentioned above Thomas la Cour Jansen received a broad range of grants in collaboration with experimental groups including recent NWO TOP (2018) a NWO Groot (2020), and NWO Klein2 (2020). Thomas la Cour Jansen serves as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Chemical Physics. Since 2015, he was a member of the International Organization Committee of the Coherent MultiDimensional Spectroscopy conference series. From 2017, Thomas la Cour Jansen was the director of the top master programme in nanoscience. 

Selected publications 2017-2022

Computational spectroscopy of complex systems T. L. C. Jansen J. Chem. Phys. 155 170901 (2021)

I summarized the recent developments in Computational Spectroscopy and presented new results for the infrared spectroscopy of the poly-Proline II protein secondary structure. I presented the assignment of the observed spectral features, which may help identifying such structures in for example misfolded proteins involved in Altzheimers, and Huntingtons diseases.

Identification and characterization of diverse coherences in the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex E. Thyrhaug, R. Tempelaar, M. J. P. Alcocer, K. Žídek, D. Bína, J. Knoester, L. C. Jansen, and D. Zigmantas Nature Chem. 10 780-786 (2018)

Together with the experimental group from Lund we demonstrated how coherences observed in photosynthetic systems can be assigned as either vibrational, electronic, or vibronic. We showed that for the highly debated FMO system the vibrational coherences dominate while short lived electronic coherences can only be observed at carefully selected conditions.

Interplay Between Hydrogen Bonding and Vibrational Coupling in Liquid N-Methylacetamide A.V. Cunha, E. Salamatova, R. Bloem, S. J. Roeters, S. Woutersen, M.S. Pshenichnikov, T. L. C. Jansen J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 8 2438-2444 (2017)

With the experimental groups of Pshenichnikov (RUG) and Woutersen (UvA) we examined the interplay between hydrogen bond formation and vibrational coupling in a model system for intrinsically disordered proteins and hydro-gels. We identified spectral markers in the anisotropy decay revealing information about the connectivity in such highly dynamic systems.