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The Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows Program catalyzes scientific discovery by investing in high-risk, high-reward research directions. The Program supports exceptional faculty working on topics in a diverse set of fields, including astronomy, physics, geology and geophysics, materials sciences (in both physics and engineering), and physical and materials chemistry. Program awards will focus on creative and novel approaches that promise to lead to important scientific breakthroughs contributing to a greater understanding of the universe and its components, from the molecular and atomic to the geological and planetary scales, among other areas. Awards also fund the development of new tools, techniques and measurements that help probe these physical phenomena in new ways.

The Heising-Simons Faculty Fellows awards will be made to two UC Berkeley faculty members each year. Each $1M faculty award will be distributed over a period of five years. All early- and mid-career UC Berkeley faculty regardless of their home department are eligible to apply.

Prof. Bediako’s project is “Manipulating Electron Transfer with Twisted Interfaces”.

Kwabena Bediako, campus assistant chemistry professor, was awarded the National Science Foundation, or NSF, CAREER award for his ongoing research and outreach proposal.

The CAREER award is a five-year grant open to assistant professors who are fairly early on in their careers, Bediako noted. This grant will help him and his team continue their work with structural distortions in atomically thin materials, as stated in the NSF award abstract.

“With the solids that we work with, the layers can slide over each other, so it turns out that you can also control how they are twisted to each other,” Bediako said. “Even this twisting effect — the angle that you twist them at can significantly transform how the material behaves.”

To honor students’ abilities for clear and effective communication in quantum physics, Optica offers a yearly “best paper” award at its International Conference on Advanced Solid State Lasers. This year, JILA graduate student Daniel Carlson was among the list of winners, with his presentation “Carbon K-Edge Soft X-Rays Driven by a 3 µm,1 kHz OPCPA Laser System” winning over the judges. Carlson, who is a researcher in JILA Fellows and University of Colorado Boulder professor Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, studies the creation of special X-rays using laser systems. Congratulations, Daniel!

Drew Morrill’s poster, titled: “High-harmonic generation from a 3 μm wavelength OPCPA,” received an award from the Colorado Photonics Industry Association. The poster illustrates a method to generate soft X-rays using laser arrays. Congratulations, Drew!