Patrick's research interests are in energy transport and coupled photonic interactions with condensed matter, soft materials, liquids, vapors, plasmas and their interfaces. His lab uses various optical thermometry-based experiments to measure the thermal conductivity, thermal boundary conductance, thermal accommodation, strain propagation and sound speed, optical properties, and electron, phonon, vibrational and polaritonic scattering mechanisms in a wide array of bulk materials and nanosystems from cryogenic to ultrahigh temperatures.