Dr. Ryan McDonnell was an undergraduate member of the Borguet group from 2018-2021, where he investigated host-guest interactions in metal organic frameworks (MOFs) under cryogenic, ultra-high vacuum conditions. In the Borguet group, Ryan worked with fellow undergraduate students and graduate mentors, who taught him how to do research and think like a scientist. From his undergraduate research, Ryan presented several presentations and co-authored four manuscripts.
Ryan attended the University of Wisconsin for his graduate studies, where he was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Professor John Wright’s laboratory. As a graduate student, Ryan developed coherent multidimensional spectroscopy (CMDS) pulse sequences involving Raman and hyper-Raman transitions to investigate vibrational and electron-vibration coupling in molecular and materials systems. Ryan received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Wisconsin in 2026 for his dissertation Exploring Hyper-Raman Transitions in Nonlinear Spectroscopy.
In April 2026, Ryan started his postdoctoral studies with Professor Eric Arsenault at Yale University, where he is currently an Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellow in Chemical Instrumentation. Ryan’s work in the Arsenault lab focuses on the development of ultrabroadband CMDS methods to investigate excited state structure and function.