Lauren Mason – Page 3

Congratulations to Naomi Ginsberg for Receiving the W. Albert Noyes, Jr. Distinguished Lecturer Honor from the University of Rochester

Prof. Naomi Ginsberg received the W. Albert Noyes, Jr. Distinguished Lecturer honor from the University of Rochester. This lectureship honors Professor Noyes, former chairman of the department, dean of the Graduate School and dean of the College of Arts and Science. Naomi’s talk was titled, “Visualizing and Controlling How Emerging Energy Materials Form, Transform, and Transport Energy at the Nanoscale.”

Congratulations to Franklin Dollar for Receiving a 2025 AISES Technical Excellence Award

Prof. Franklin Dollar received the 2025 AISES Technical Excellence Award. The Technical Excellence awardee has made a significant contribution to science, engineering, or technology by having designed, developed, managed, or assisted in the development of a product, service, system, or intellectual property.

AISES professional honorees go beyond personal achievements, extending their commitment to excellence to co-workers, family, community youth, and Tribal and First Nations. Their narratives, intricately woven with resilience, hard work, dedication, and discovery, form the core of AISES stories.

AISES Professional Awardees are perpetual learners and visionaries, driven by a fervor for fostering high-quality collective thinking. As builders, they craft platforms that empower their organizations and communities. Whether embracing formal science later in life or creatively infusing Indigenous values into their work, these trailblazers produce innovation and inspiration. Congratulations, Franklin!

Congratulations to Kwabena Bediako for Receiving a 2025 Calvin University Alumni Award

Prof. Kwabena Bediako received the 2025 Calvin University Alumni Award. This award is granted to Calvin alumni in recognition of young grads who are making a splash in their careers and communities, thus personifying the mission of the Calvin Alumni Association. Congratulations, Kwabena!

Congratulations to Kwabena Bediako for Receiving a 2025 CIFAR Fellowship

Prof. Kwabena Bediako has received a 2025 CIFAR Fellowship! The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a globally influential research organization proudly based in Canada. We mobilize the world’s most brilliant people across disciplines and at all career stages to advance transformative knowledge and solve humanity’s biggest problems, together. We are supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Québec, as well as Canadian and international foundations, individuals, corporations and partner organizations. Congratulations, Kwabena!

Congratulations to Kwabena Bediako for Receiving a 2025 Scialog Fellowship

Prof. Kwabena Bediako received a 2025 Scialog Fellowship! Approximately 50 early career faculty are invited to participate as Fellows for each Scialog, with early career spanning the time from the first year on the faculty through recently post-tenure.

Scialog supports research, intensive dialogue, and community building to address scientific challenges of global significance. Within each multi-year initiative, Scialog Fellows participate in intensive discussions to identify bottlenecks and encourage innovative approaches, collaborate in high-risk discovery research on untested ideas, and communicate their progress in annual closed conferences. The Scialog process is guided by senior scientists recognized as world-leading researchers in the area of focus. Ultimately, Scialog aims to advance human knowledge by empowering a national community of early career scientists with many promising years of research ahead of them to tackle challenging multidisciplinary problems.

Scialog aims to support early career faculty to expand research in a focused area of high scientific importance; encourage scientists to form multidisciplinary teams to tackle these critical challenges; and help transition awardees to obtain further funding for their innovative ideas. Success for Scialog Fellows is measured by highly impactful results, ongoing support from private foundations and federal agencies, and, ultimately, scientific breakthroughs.

Computational Methods for Atomic Electron Tomography

Abstract: Atomic electron tomography (AET) enables the determination of 3D atomic structures by acquiring a sequence of 2D TEM projection measurements of a particle and then computationally solving for its underlying 3D representation. AET is a challenging and labor-intensive experiment! In this talk, we offer two computational methods to alleviate these challenges and make the reconstruction procedure more robust.

First, we describe a method that solves directly for the locations and properties of individual atoms from projection measurements. This is in contrast to classical tomography algorithms that first solve for a volume and then extract the atomic structure. We parameterize a particle as a collection of atoms each represented by a Gaussian. We show that this parameterization imparts a strong prior on the reconstruction that avoids physically implausible artifacts often present in volumetric reconstructions due to noise and missing wedge effects. These reconstruction improvements further translate to higher fidelity atomic structure identification.

Second, we tackle the problem of carbon contamination: over the time it takes to capture the tomographic projection series, amorphous carbon often accumulates on the sample surface, making it difficult to reconstruct the underlying static sample and causing laboriously collected datasets to be discarded. We use implicit neural representations, which compactly represent large 3D+time data cubes and impose flexible space-time priors, to directly model and solve for the 3D temporal dynamics of the sample This allows us to computationally remove the contamination and recover an uncorrupted reconstruction of the static sample of interest.

Speaker Bios:

Nalini Singh is a postdoc in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley, advised by Laura Waller. Her research focuses on inverse problems in medical and scientific imaging. Previously, she earned a PhD and Bachelor’s degree from MIT and was a student researcher at Google.

Tiffany Chien is a graduate student in EECS at UC Berkeley advised by Laura Waller, working on applying computational imaging algorithms to electron microscopy. Previously, she was a computer science and linguistics major at UC Berkeley. She has a cat named Meatball.

Ultrafast nano-imaging resolving carrier and lattice dynamics on the nanoscale

Abstract: Ultrafast infrared spectroscopy in its extension to nano-imaging provides access to vibrational and low energy carrier dynamics in molecular, semiconductor, quantum, or polaritonic materials. In addition, to simultaneously probe both ground and excited state dynamics we have developed ultrafast heterodyne pump-probe nano-imaging with far-from-equilibrium excitation. In ultrafast movies with simultaneous spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution we can image heterogeneities in electron-phonon, cation-lattice, and coupled polaron dynamics on their elementary time and length scales. As exemplary application we use ultrafast pump-probe nanoimaging to provide a real-space and real-time view of the coupled electron-lattice dynamics underlying the photo-physical response of hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites resolving the heterogeneous evolution of polaron lifetimes. From subsequent excited state spectroscopic nanoimaging of the formamidinium (FA) cation vibration as local probe of the molecular environment, we link a transient vibrational blueshift to local variations in lattice polarizability and polaron stability. The high degree of local variation in polaron-cation coupling dynamics points towards the missing link between the optoelectronic heterogeneity and associated carrier dynamics. The results suggest that there is a lot of room for improved synthesis and device engineering and that perovskite photophysical performance is far from its fundamental limits.

Speaker Bio: Markus Raschke is professor at the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His research is on the development and application of nano-scale nonlinear and ultrafast spectroscopy to control the light-matter interaction on the nanoscale. These techniques allow for imaging structure and dynamics of molecular and quantum matter with nanometer spatial resolution. He received his PhD in 2000 from the Max-Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and the Technical University in Munich, Germany. Following research appointments at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Max-Born-Institute in Berlin, he became faculty member at the University of Washington in 2006, before moving to Boulder in 2010. He is fellow of the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Explorers Club.

X-Ray and Electron Tomography: From Images to Volumes to Knowledge

Abstract: One of the ultimate goals of microscopy is to understand the structure of materials from the images we obtain. Recent advances in X-ray and electron microscopy—including smaller probes, efficient detectors, and advanced computational imaging tools—are bringing us closer to this goal. However, most imaging workflows remain two-dimensional (2D), providing only projected information from inherently three-dimensional (3D) objects. By acquiring full 3D data sets and applying tomographic reconstruction, one can recover the true structure of a sample. In this talk, I will present the workflow and limitations of nanoscale tomography using X-ray and electron microscopy—from optimizing 2D image contrast, to acquiring tomographic data, to reconstructing 3D volumes. Drawing on examples from STROBE projects, I will show how structural knowledge gained from these volumes—such as atomic models, nanoporosity, and magnetic fields—provides critical insights across a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Speaker Bio: Colum earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Trinity College Dublin and completed a PhD in Materials Science at the University of Oxford. In 2020, he joined UCLA as a STROBE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Miao Group, where he advanced ptychography and tomography techniques for 3D imaging of individual light atoms. Colum recently joined SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as a Research Associate, where he focuses on multiscale, multimodal imaging approaches for microelectronics.

Building Materials from the Nanocrystal Up

Using the Advanced Light Source (ALS), researchers clarified the mechanism—an unusual intermediate state—that accelerates the transformation of nanocrystals into a superlattice with fewer defects using a two-step, instead of a one-step, process.

“Nanoscale Imaging: Soft X-ray STXM and Ptychography at the ALS”

Abstract: Advancements in materials research increasingly require visualization of structure, composition, and functionality at the nanometer scale. Soft X-ray Ptychography and Scanning Transmission X-ray Microscopy (STXM) are two complementary techniques that leverage the brightness and coherence of synchrotron radiation at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) to probe materials with high spatial resolution and enhanced chemical sensitivity. This seminar offers conceptual insights and practical guidance for designing and executing STXM and ptychography experiments, illustrated with examples such as precipitate formation in catalytic particles, chemical dynamics in battery materials, and labyrinth domain formation in magnetic thin films. The experimental workflow is outlined, from sample preparation and data acquisition to common challenges and management of beam time. Finally, the seminar covers data processing and interpretation, including ptychographic reconstructions, X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) analysis, and tomographic reconstructions.

Speaker Bio: Jayden Plumb completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Utah and earned his graduate degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Advanced Light Source at LBNL, he specializes in 3D imaging techniques using soft X-rays. He is currently interested in imaging novel nanoscale magnetic structures and nanoscale devices.

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About Lauren Mason