During summer breaks, he participated in research experience for undergraduate programs, studying semiconductor thin film growth and characterization at Iowa State University,[2] fabricating and modeling ion-exchanged waveguides at the Gérard Mourou Center for Ultrafast Optical Science at the University of Michigan,[3] and building quasi-continuous-wave diode pumped solid state lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

He worked on the development of ultrafast lasers, coherent control of quantum systems, and the study of extreme nonlinear optics.

[5] This work contributed to the development of attophysics by manipulating the strong-field dynamics of atomic electron wave functions with ~10 attosecond precision.

[6][7] Attosecond physics was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023, conferred to three scientists “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter.”[8] During his graduate career, Bartels was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and received the Optical Society of America’s New Focus Student Research Award, and a JILA Scientific Achievement Award,[9] as well as the IEEE Photonics Society Graduate Fellowship.

[10] Bartels began his independent research career at Colorado State University, where he was awarded a Monfort Professorship, and held joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and in the School of Biomedical Engineering.