Goff received the Science Graduate Student Research (SCGRS) fellowship from the United States Department of Energy and will be conducting research at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Lab (SLAC) in Menlo Park, CA this year. The SLAC Lab houses a powerful x-ray source and laser used to capture movies of molecular processes.

“These experiments are really difficult to pull off because molecules move extremely fast, in femtosecond timescales, which is a millionth of a billionth of a second,” he says.

Through the SCGRS fellowship, Goff is working with a team of SLAC scientists to shorten the laser pulses used to initiate molecular movements, from their current length of 80-120 femtoseconds to about 30 femtoseconds.

“With the upgrades to the x-ray pulses from the SLAC scientists, and the improvements to the laser pulses that our team is working on, we'll be able to see these molecular processes even better, and study new ones which so far have been too fast for us to capture,” says Goff. 

Advancements made to the laser source at SLAC Lab will directly lead to new experiments and help Goff further define his dissertation research at Brown. 

As an aspect of his graduate experience, Goff says teaching stands out as an aspect that he truly enjoys. “As cool as our research is, I love teaching, especially office hours when I can help a student understand something difficult.”

In this short video, one of the SLAC scientists who Goff is working with explains how molecular movies are captured.