The NSF GRFP recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported STEM disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited US institutions. The five-year fellowship includes three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $34,000 and a cost of education allowance of $12,000 to the institution.
Professor Dollar is now recognized as a 2022 Kavli Fellow, a joint endeavor by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and the Kavli Foundation. He presented his work on high intensity laser matter interactions at the 2022 Kavli Frontiers of Science U.S. Symposium. Attendance to the symposium is by invitation only, and attendees are selected from among award winners for early career scientists in the U.S. and abroad. Attendees include Sloan Fellows, Packard Fellows, MacArthur Genius Grantees, Pew Fellows, Searle Scholars, and Presidential Early Career Awardees for Scientists and Engineers. Since the inception of the program in 1989, over 5,000 distinguished young scientists have attended a Kavli symposium and are designated Kavli Fellows.
The APS Career Mentoring Fellows Program has accepted Dr. Chen-Ting Liao into their 2022-2023 cohort! The Career Mentoring (CM) Fellows program seeks physicists working in industry, government/national labs, or academia, who are interested in mentoring undergraduate students, learning and teaching about diverse career paths of physics degree holders, and establishing a stronger connection with the physics community.
Contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) reaches more and more its limits with respect to power consumption and heat dissipation with ICT already consuming about 7% of global energy. Already several decades ago, the use of the magnetic spin as information unit has been suggested to overcome these limits, offering a path to low-power data processing. Time-Resolved X-ray Microscopy is a valuable addition to the common spectromicroscopy techniques used in the research and design process of spintronics and magnonics, allowing the element-specific and spatially resolved characterization of dynamic magnetic properties of materials and logic designs on the sub-30 nm scale. In my talk I’m going to introduce Time-resolved Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy and its application in studying magnonics in addition to Ferromagnetic Resonance spectroscopy and Micromagnetic simulations. In addition, I will present a concept of a Magnonic Cellular Nonlinear Network as an approach for massively parallel magnonic processing.
Congratulations to Bin Wang for receiving the 2022 SPIE BACUS Scholarship! The SPIE BACUS Scholarship was set up in 1998 to reward the most qualified students who wish to work in the fields of photomask and microlithography manufacturing for the semiconductor industry. This award will partially assist with pursuing Bin’s career goals in the fields of microlithography, photomask technology and/or optical/EUV photolithography technologies.
The BACUS Steering Committee, in concert with the SPIE Scholarship Committee, will work with institutions of higher learning to identify candidates and award scholarships to help prepare them to make significant contributions to industry.
In the 17th Century, a Dutch merchant named Antony van Leeuwenhoek began experimenting with making new microscope lenses and, in the process, plunged humanity into a new world—this one teeming with previously-undiscovered life, from small bacteria to single-celled algae and more.
More than 400 years later, scientists are in the midst of an equally-important revolution. They’re diving into a previously-hidden realm—far wilder than anything van Leeuwenhoek, known as the “father of microbiology,” could have imagined. Some researchers, like physicists Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, are exploring this world of even tinier things with microscopes that are many times more precise than the Dutch scientist’s. Others, like Jun Ye, are using lasers to cool clouds of atoms to just a millionth of a degree above absolute zero with the goal of collecting better measurements of natural phenomena.
Congratulations to Fort Lewis College, University of California Irvine, and Florida International University for being awarded and recognized in the NSF COVID-19 Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Challenge.
Fort Lewis College, a Native American serving, non-tribal institution, awards more undergraduate degrees to Native American students than any other college in the U.S. Prior to COVID-19, first-to-second year retention rates among native students increased from 55% to 67% between 2015-2019; however, for the 2020 first-year cohort there was a 20% decline to 47%. The short-term impacts of COVID-19 revealed challenges in student academic preparedness. Many of the challenges have been exacerbated among Native American students, all of whom are pursuing STEM degrees, and at a stage where college readiness is critical. The Fort Lewis College Taking Action submission describes three evidence-based and system efforts (first-year launch course, foundational mathematics support, and holistic student support services) to increase student success, retention and ultimately in the long-term, conferral of STEM baccalaureate degrees.
At the University of California, Irvine (UCI), 20% of the student population is Hispanic, Latino, or Pacific Islanders. Surveys demonstrated that COVID exacerbated the already existing challenges for many of these students working as teaching assistants, especially with pivoting to remote learning. In support of these students, the UCI developed three different initiatives. Fellowships were provided for students to conduct contact tracing. A Summer Fellows program was also developed to train graduate students in inclusive pedagogy, with a focus on cultural competency, and innovative technologies. Assessment of the program demonstrated improved outcomes for undergraduate students from underrepresented populations taught by Fellows. In addition, UCI offered funding for summer research to graduate students from underrepresented populations who had a record of participation in DEI activities such as mentoring other students from underrepresented populations. Support for Graduate Inclusive Excellence Fellows continued in 2021 and is expected to continue in the future. All of these initiatives are undergoing iterative improvement through assessment and evaluation.
The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences announced 31 finalists today for the 2022 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists, the world’s largest unrestricted prize honoring early-career scientists and engineers. From that exceptional group, three winners—in life sciences, chemistry, and physical sciences & engineering—will be named on June 29, each receiving $250,000 as a Blavatnik National Awards Laureate. The honorees were chosen from a highly competitive pool of 309 nominees from 150 leading universities and scientific institutions from 38 states across the United States.
The increasing ability to perform high throughput electron microscopy has created a need for robust, automated analysis that appears addressable by machine learning (ML) tools. Approaches such as convolutional neural nets (CNNs) are finding increased application in scientific data analysis tasks, including analysis of electron microscopy imaging data. However, electron microscopy data varies significantly from natural images. To provide robust ML analysis for increasingly large and complex electron microscopy datasets, we have performed experimental and simulated studies to examine how experimental variation should be included in a training dataset for robust performance and maximum accuracy across workflows. We have also analyzed the role that network architecture plays, and present methods to increase performance of lightweight networks. Ultimately, our tools advance performance of ML workflows that can shed light on structural variation and correlation of large populations of nanomaterials from imaging data.