Malkiat S. Johal Associate Professor of Chemistry, Pomona College

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E-mail: malkiat.johal@pomona.edu Office: Seaver Chemistry Laboratory, Room 110 (Office), Room 23 (Research laboratory) Telephone:  Office: (909) 607-4253, Lab: (909) 607-7959, Cell: (909) 275-1121 Fax:  (909) 607-7726 Chemistry Department home page Pomona College home page Download VCard

Dr. Johal joined the department in July 2006. He has taught courses in General Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, Surface Chemistry, Nanomaterials, and Instrumental Methods. His research activities focus on using self-assembly and ionic adsorption processes to fabricate nano-materials for optical and biochemical applications. Undergraduate research students are heavily involved in both the construction of and the detailed characterization of ultra-thin assemblies. These functional materials include biosurfaces (immobilized proteins) within polyelectrolyte multilayers, asymmetrically orientated surfactant multilayers, and self-assembled polyelectrolytes with interesting photoluminescent, photovoltaic and NLO-active properties. Professor Johal’s laboratory also explores fundamental issues such as ion-pair complexation, adsorption phenomena, surface wettability, and intermolecular non-covalent interactions that lead to highly ordered macro-structures. His laboratory is also exploring the use of functionalized stacked waveguides and piezoelectric quartz crystal resonators as platforms for chemical and biological detection, catalysis, and the nano-fabrication of photovoltaic and organic LED materials. Research students in his laboratory use a variety of surface analysis tools including Dual Polarization Interferometry, Quartz-Crystal Microbalance with Dissipation Monitoring, Surface Tensiometry, Spectroscopy (e.g. ATR-FTIR), X-Ray Reflectivity, Multi-Wavelength Ellipsometry, and Contact Angle analysis.

After receiving his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Johal was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on nonlinear optical techniques utilizing optical parametric generation/amplification for sum-frequency generation and second-harmonic generation. Before joining Pomona College, he was an Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at New College of Florida. Follow the links above or below for course related material or for further information about his research program.

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