Professor John (Jianwei) Miao at UCLA has been elected as a 2025 Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) for his research in pioneering coherent diffractive imaging for a wide range of material systems and atomic electron tomography for determining the three-dimensional atomic structure of crystal defects and amorphous materials. Congratulations, John!
Today, President Biden awarded nearly 400 scientists and engineers the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.
Established by President Clinton in 1996, PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership early in their research careers. The award recognizes innovative and far-reaching developments in science and technology, expands awareness of careers in science and engineering, recognizes the scientific missions of participating agencies, enhances connections between research and impacts on society, and highlights the importance of science and technology for our nation’s future.
From Day One of his Administration, President Biden has recognized the important role that science and technology plays in creating a better society. He made historic progress, increasing federally funded research and development and deploying past research and development at an unprecedented scale through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act.
This year’s awardees are employed or funded by 14 participating agencies within the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Interior, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs and the Environmental Protection Agency, the intelligence community, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution.
STROBE and JILA graduate student Clay Klein has been awarded the prestigious 2025 Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship, presented by SPIE, the International Society for Optics and Photonics, and Siemens EDA. The scholarship, valued at $10,000, recognizes Klein’s outstanding contributions to the field of optics and photonics.
“I am honored to be awarded the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship,” Klein stated. “This scholarship provides me with the exciting opportunity to share my research in this field and connect with others in the industry at the SPIE conference in February.”
Klein conducts research in the laboratories of JILA Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder Physics professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn. His work focuses on cutting-edge advancements in nanoscale extreme ultraviolet imaging science.
The award will be formally presented during the Welcome and Plenary Presentation at the SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning Conference in San Jose, California, on February 24, 2025. Congratulations Clay!
Tanner works on self-assembling nanocrystals, which could be the basis for less expensive, easier to build displays and solar cells.
What Christian Tanner wants to do, ultimately, is help create materials that could be applied to building better solar cells or video displays — and to do that big-picture work, he coaxes nanoscopically tiny building blocks to put themselves together and watches the process unfold using X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
For his efforts, Tanner will receive the 2024 SSRL Scientific Development Award, to be presented at the SSRL/LCLS User’s Meeting taking place September 22-27. The award comes with $1,000 to help promote the dissemination of research performed at SSRL.
Laura Waller, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at University of California Berkeley, has been awarded the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal for her outstanding achievements in computational microscopy.
Prof. Waller uses algorithms – some of which are based on machine learning – to improve microscopy, particularly of biological samples, as well as the imaging of astronomical objects. This pioneer of computational microscopy is combining computer science and simple instruments to achieve such things as making more details visible and creating three-dimensional images or videos. Among other things, Laura Waller has further developed the phase contrast microscope, which can also image transparent objects. She has formulated algorithms that determine quantitative information about the phase of light waves – in simple terms, this is the displacement of light waves relative to each other– from a few images with illumination from different angles. The resulting images not only better visualise the shape of cells, but also allow better cell tracking. In another invention, the DiffuserCam, Waller places an uneven plastic plate on a light sensor, which scatters the incoming light. Very detailed 3D images can then be reconstructed from a single sensor reading, with applications in microscopy and astronomical imaging. The technology also makes it possible to create high-speed videos with low-speed camera equipment.
Congratulations to Benjamin Hammel for receiving the First Place Poster Award and Emma Nelson for receiving the Third Place Poster Award at the 2024 Innovation in Materials Symposium! This symposium brought together the materials research community at CU Boulder and beyond for presentations by faculty and students as well as discussion and collaboration opportunities.
The Philomathia Prize has been presented annually since 2022 to an early-career Berkeley faculty member, from any discipline, who demonstrates great distinction and promise in their academic field. The prize, established through a generous endowment gift from the Philomathia Foundation, comes with a monetary award of $200,000 for use at the awardee’s discretion over a three-year period.
Anya Grafov, a graduate student at JILA, has been awarded the Best Poster Award at the IEEE Magnetics Society Summer School 2024. Studying under JILA Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder Physics professors Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, Grafov’s poster titled “Probing Ultrafast Spin Dynamics with Extreme Ultraviolet High Harmonics” was one of only nine to receive this prestigious recognition.
“Winning this award from the IEEE Magnetics Society is an incredible honor. It validates the hard work and dedication put into our research and motivates us to continue pushing the boundaries in magnetics research,” stated Grafov. “Our technique is quite niche, so I wanted to focus my poster on our actual measurement technique and the experiments we conduct. It’s an overview of the measurement technique and examples of two recent projects we’ve been working on using our beamline.”
Highlighting the fundamentals and new research, like Grafov’s, in magnetics, the annual summer school brings together graduate students worldwide to study magnetism through lectures by international experts and poster presentations.
“It was a great experience to learn about different aspects of magnetism, from fundamental research to applied technologies like spintronic devices and magnetic artificial intelligence,” she added.