Kartik joined the group as a Ph.D. student in the fall of 2015. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Metallurgical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Varanasi, India. He worked on synthesizing nanoscale structures of CdSe and characterizing their absorption, photoluminescence and structure for his undergraduate project. He is interested in using the Transmission Electron Microscope (TEM) as a primary tool to explore the effects of surface lattice dynamics on photocatalytic activity. His current research is focused on corroborating experimental vibrational Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (EELS) data with the dielectric response theory to understand the fundamentals of this technique.