Professor Reppert is a Kansas native, he completed his BS at Kansas State University in 2009 in Chemistry, Biochemistry, and Math. It was also at Kansas State (during four years of undergrad research) where he became fascinated by the molecular mechanisms of photosynthesis. After a year of Fulbright research at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, he went on to work in 2D IR spectroscopy and peptide structural analysis with Andrei Tokmakoff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago. After obtaining his PhD in 2016, he worked as a Banting Scholar with Professor Paul Brumer at the Chemical Physics Theory group of the University of Toronto, investigating the importance—or nonimportance—of quantum effects in biological light harvesting. In 2019, he moved to Purdue where he began his own research group in Physical Chemistry, working to develop both experimental and computational tools to quantitatively understand structure/spectrum relationships in biomacromolecules, particularly photosynthetic proteins.

Professor Reppert's primary research interest is to understand the "structure-spectrum" relationship in photosynthetic chlorophyll proteins. By constructing point mutants in both model proteins and in intact cyanobacterial photosystems (especially photosystem II), we are working to explore the role of electrostatic, steric, and ligation interactions in the structure-based tuning of chlorophyll properties. Simultaneously, we are using these experimental insights to build advanced simulation models and user-friendly, online software applications (see https://nanohub.org/tools/pigmenthunter) that can be used to rationally design modified chlorophyll proteins for efficient biofuel production. Finally, we are also working to develop novel approaches to using vibrational spectroscopy as a residue-specific probes of protein structure in complex, disordered systems.

Toyota Research Institute of North America, Purdue College of Science, Purdue College of Engineering, Purdue Department of Chemistry, Purdue Department of Physics and Astronomy, Purdue School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue Quantum Science and Engineering Institute

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Michael Earl Reppert (2023), "Quantum Dynamics and Open Quantum Systems," https://nanohub.org/resources/38226.

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