Splash Biography

Photosynthesis provides all of the Earth’s oxygen, plays a pivotal role in the global climate, and serves as the energy source for essentially all living things on Earth. Specifically, it enables plants and other organisms to capture sunlight and convert it to usable chemical energy. In this course, we will first discuss the underlying principles behind photosynthesis with an emphasis on the structure of the photosynthetic apparatus. We will then examine the properties of light and the physical processes of absorption and fluorescence before learning how we can make use of specialized laser systems to study these processes in intact photosynthetic organisms.