Our laboratory studies the flow of energy between different forms of light and matter. For example, we are interested in how a photon carries energy to excite an electron in a tree’s leaf, which then leads to a chemical reaction where new chemical bonds are made, followed by a spin flip (which removes a bit more energy) and then finally the release of all the remaining energy into the thermal motion of the nuclei. At each step along the process, energy takes different forms. Two unifying principles are: (i) the total energy is always conserved (which we can verify with dynamics) and (ii) the total energy inevitably is broken apart into smaller and smaller chunks of energy (which is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics). The goal of our research program is to quantify all of the effects above and make contact with a vast array of modern experiments in catalysis, electrochemistry, photochemistry, and energy science.