Affiliation: University of North Carolina State University, Department of Chemistry

Stefan Franzen has been a professor of Chemistry at North Carolina State University since 1997. He studied music and languages in a Music High School in Stockholm, Sweden and graduated in 1976. He attended UC Berkeley and majored in Chemistry graduating in 1982. He served for three years in the US Peace Corps in Kenya. He studied photosynthetic electron transfer reactions as a graduate student in Dr. Steven Boxer’s research group at Stanford University and earned a PhD in Physical Chemistry in 1992. He received a European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) fellowship for study at the Ecole, Polytechnique in Palaiseau, France. There he conducted ultrafast resonance Raman studies of hemoglobin initiated by photolysis of carbon monoxide. This research demonstrated the ultrarapid iron motion out of the plane of the heme. In 1994 he received a Director’s Fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He worked with Woody Woodruff and Brian Dyer on heme protein dynamics extensively using resonance Raman spectroscopy and ultrafast spectroscopy. At NC State University, his research focused on the structure and function of the multifunctional heme protein, dehaloperoxidase, as well as infrared plasmonic materials and fundamental spectroscopic experiments to understand surface plasmon resonance. He developed two long-term collaborations, one at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China starting in 2004 and the other at Adam Mickiewicz