Book excerpt: This project involved the experimental probing of the electronic excited states generated by photoinduced (center-to-center) electron and energy transfer processes in several classes of transition metal donor/acceptor (D/A) complexes. Some of the general properties inferred from these studies should be useful in the design of new systems for energy conversion applications. Pursuit of the project goals has involved the determination of electron transfer efficiencies and the detailed study of variations in the electronic spectra of D/A complexes. This has resulted in the study of some very fundamental issues of photoinduced charge transfer and the identification of some of the constraints on its efficiency. The experimental studies of the competition between the degradative non-radiative unimolecular relaxation of transition metal excited states and their transfer of charge from these excited states to external acceptors have involved a range of techniques such as transient decay kinetics, photoacoustic calorimetry and transient or stationary state spectroscopy. The substrates synthesized for these studies were selected to provide model systems, or series of model systems to probe the validity of models of electronic excited states and their reactivity. The work during the last few years has focused largely, but not exclusively, on the use of emission spectral band shapes to probe the properties of charge transfer (CT) excited states. Bandshape variations are one of the very few approaches for systematically probing electronic excited states and good band shape resolution is necessary in order to gain information about the structural variations that correlate with excited state reactivity. Differences in molecular structure correlate with differences in chemical reactivity, and the variations in emission bandshapes are well known to relate to variations in the molecular structural differences between the excited and ground electronic states. However, it is has been rarely noticed that configurational mixing of the lowest energy excited state with other electronic states leads to unique distortions of the lowest energy excited state which result in modifications in the vibronic structure and bandshape of the emission. We have used the emission sideband shapes to evaluate patterns of ground state-excited state and excited state-excited state configurational mixing in some simple series of complexes.