DrGerard O'Connor

As a Senior Technologist at Deakin's Institute for Frontier Materials, Gerry manages a broad suite of more than 40 characterisation instruments, including spectrometers, Raman and FTIR microscopes, tensiometers, rheometers, thermal analysis instruments and gas-adsorption instruments. Gerry has developed extensive expertise in the characterisation of energy materials, advanced alloys, polymers, fibres, textiles and composites.

Prior to joining Deakin, Gerry was an award-winning and of internationally recognised postdoctoral research spectroscopist with experience working in Australia, France, Switzerland and the United States of America. Gerry’s research was motivated by improving our understanding of the Interstellar media, reactive intermediates and better understanding how the conformational structure of biomolecules are driven by intramolecular and intermolecular hydrogen bonding. Specialising in a wide range of spectroscopy techniques, Gerry pioneered several advances in double-resonance spectroscopy. Gerry also worked extensively with computational chemistry methods, identifying trends in the correlation of TD-DFT calculated excitation energies with experimental values, allowing more accurate predictions of electronic origin bands when working with limited computational reasorces. 

Gerry's unique combination of internationally recognised spectroscopy research experience and seven years leading advanced materials characterisation infrastructure makes him an expert in applying advanced characterisation solutions to real world materials chemistry challenges.