Rate My Professor Michael Therien

Duke University

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5.04/23/2026

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About Michael

Michael J. Therien is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Chemistry at Duke University, positions he has held since 2009 and 2008, respectively. He is also a Member of the Duke Cancer Institute since 2008. Previous appointments at Duke include Professor of Biomedical Engineering from 2014 to 2017 and Faculty Network Member of The Energy Initiative from 2012 to 2022. Therien earned a B.S. from the University of St. Andrews, United Kingdom, in 1982, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego, in 1987. He completed an NIH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology from 1987 to 1990.

In Chemistry, Therien's research involves the synthesis of compounds, supermolecular assemblies, nano-scale objects, and electronic materials with unusual ground- and excited-state characteristics, interrogated using transient optical, spectroscopic, photophysical, and electrochemical methods. This work spans physical inorganic chemistry, physical organic chemistry, synthetic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, spectroscopy, photophysics, excited-state dynamics, spintronics, and imaging. Key themes include de novo protein constructs for photosynthetic energy transduction, organic, nanoscale, and self-assembled structures relevant to solar energy conversion, hybrid semiconducting polymer/carbon nanotube superstructures for optical, electro-optic, and spintronic applications, electron spin selectivity of chiral matter, sustainable electronics, medical imaging, and charge-transfer dynamics relevant to protein-mediated energy transduction. As principal investigator, he has received grants from NSF, DOE, NIH, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the W.M. Keck Foundation, including long-standing awards such as Collaborative Research: De Novo Protein Constructs for Photosynthetic Energy Transduction (NSF, 2014-2028) and Organic, Nanoscale, & Self-Assembled Structures Relevant to Solar Energy Conversion (DOE, 2009-2028). Representative publications include "Highly conjugated, acetylenyl bridged porphyrins: new models for light-harvesting antenna systems" (Science, 1994), "Biochemistry and theory of proton-coupled electron transfer" (Chemical Reviews, 2014), "Near-infrared-emissive polymersomes: self-assembled soft matter for in vivo optical imaging" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2005), and "Driving Force Dependent Photoinduced Charge Transfer Dynamics in Polymer-Wrapped Semiconducting Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes" (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025). Therien's contributions are reflected in over 19,000 citations. He has served on selection committees for the Beckman Young Investigator Program multiple times between 2004 and 2014, NIH study sections, DOE review panels, and chaired the ARPA-E Solar Energy Review Panel in 2009.