Tom Hopper is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Central Florida. After completing a Masters degree in Chemistry at Newcastle University (2016), he became the first graduate student of Artem Bakulin at Imperial College London, which began with building a brand new femtosecond laser suite for the Chemistry department, and culminated in numerous awards for his thesis on ultrafast photophysics in organic, hybrid and nanoscale materials and devices. Following an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship in the same lab, Tom moved to Stanford University (2021) as a TomKat Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainable Energy, continuing research into energy transport in emerging photovoltaics in the group of Aaron Lindenberg. Tom then joined SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (2023) full time as a Postdoctoral Scholar in Photon Science. Working with Adi Natan and Kelly Gaffney, Tom developed pulse sequences to exert coherent control of photochemical structural and solvation dynamics, and image these processes with the world’s brightest X-rays at the LCLS free electron laser. Since December 2024, Tom has led a research group at UCF, focusing on ultrafast laser control tools to advance the materials & device science of molecular and nanoscale systems for novel energy, optoelectronic and quantum technologies.