Dr. Leszek Frasinski

Biography

Leszek Frasinski is an experimental physicist and a Distinguished Research Fellow at Imperial College London, specializing in the fundamental understanding of chemical bond dynamics. His research focuses on exposing simple molecules to intense and short laser pulses to detect molecular fragments using particle spectrometers. After earning his doctorate in 1980 from Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, he joined the University of Reading as a Research Assistant, working closely with Mike Tinker on the spectroscopy of molecular ions. Leszek was appointed Lecturer in 1984, where he collaborated with Keith Codling on synchrotron radiation studies of molecules at Daresbury Laboratory. In 1986, he pioneered probing molecular dynamics with intense laser pulses and has conducted experiments at renowned institutes including Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and Saclay Laboratory near Paris. He initiated studies of ultrafast processes involving atoms and molecules with intense x-ray lasers at DESY research centre in Hamburg and SLAC Accelerator Laboratory in California. In 1995, he became a Reader at Reading and was appointed a Professor in 2006. He has developed a covariance mapping technique to analyze molecular mass spectra, which is currently utilized by a startup company.

Research Interests