Thomas Speak

I am primarily working on building a slow flow reactor to study reaction kinetics and product formation for reactions related to chemistry in the interstellar medium. In addition, I am working on the FIRECAN project funded by the CSA to use sentinel satellite data retrievals of Glyoxal and Formaldehyde and modelling to evaluate the chemistry that occurs in forest fire smoke plumes.

This system will use pulsed laser photolysis of radical precursors to initate chemistry and will follow the reaction using single photon ionization mass spectrometry and laser induced fluorescence detection.

Additonally, I carry out ab-initio calcualtions to build potential energy surfaces for reactions that we will study and use these to then carry out master equation modelling and variational transition state calculations for these reactions . This theoretical work can be used to assess and target reactions for experimental study and can be used to extract additional information out of the experimental data.