Lauren Mason – Page 5

Congrats to Stephanie Hart for Receiving a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation

Stephanie Hart has been awarded the Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project titled, “Nanoscale imaging of ultrafast energy flow in photosynthetic architectures.” The Arnold O. Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship in Chemical Sciences or Chemical Instrumentation Award Program supports advanced research by postdoctoral scholars within the core areas of fundamental chemistry or the development and build of chemical instrumentation. Congratulations, Stephanie!

Congrats to Ahyoung Kim for Receiving a Schmidt Science Fellowship

Eric and Wendy Schmidt have announced the Schmidt Science Fellows for 2023. This year’s cohort of 32 Fellows are all recent PhD’s who’ve been identified as some of the most outstanding early-career scientists in the world.

The Schmidt Science Fellows was the first program supported by Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative co-founded by former Google CEO and Chairman Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy, President of the Schmidt Family Foundation. The current class is the sixth cohort in the program, which is fully funded by Schmidt Futures and delivered in a partnership with the Rhodes Trust.

Considered one of the most prestigious scientific postdoctoral awards in the world, Schmidt Science Fellows are awarded support for either one or two years in a field of study that pivots from their Ph.D concentration. In addition to an annual stipend of $100,000, they receive individualized mentoring and participation in the program’s Global Meeting Series, which provides training, introductions to new concepts, visits to leading interdisciplinary scientific centers, and opportunities to engage with thought-leaders from science, business, policy, and society.

Congrats to Gordana Dukovic for Receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship

Congrats to Prof. Gordana Dukovic, who was named as one of the 2023 Guggenheim Fellows! The fellowship is a highly competitive award available to mid-career Americans and Canadians who have “demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional ability in the arts and exhibit great promise for their future endeavors.” Prof. Dukovic is the only awardee in the field of chemistry this year.

Congrats to Benjamin Hammel for Receiving an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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 purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. GRFP seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans. The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000.

Congrats to Olivia Bird for Receiving an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

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 purpose of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) is to ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States. GRFP seeks to broaden participation in science and engineering of underrepresented groups, including women, minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans. The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support inclusive of an annual stipend of $37,000.

Congrats to Kwabena Bediako for Receiving a Heising-Simons Faculty Fellowship

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”.

Congrats to Kwabena Bediako for Receiving an NSF Career Award

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.”

Electron-beam-induced dynamics of colloids at fluid interfaces

Abstract: Electron beams present a new platform for manipulating colloidal particles with localized nanoscale control. Leveraging the high spatial and temporal resolution of scanning electron microscopy, we investigate the driven response of dispersed silica particles pinned to the interface of an ionic liquid droplet. By tuning the beam voltage, we precisely adjust both the strength and polarity of the interaction, sweeping between repulsive and attractive regimes. With this improved control, we demonstrate the capability of directed particle transport for writing colloidal patterns at the droplet surface. We additionally use this platform to explore particle-particle interactions in dense monolayers of bidisperse size mixtures. We find that the interaction is inherently non-additive, as determined by the confined packing geometry. Adjusting the particle size ratio modulates this geometric non-additivity, providing a unique platform for systematically investigating its structural and dynamic consequences.

Speaker bio: Jonathan Raybin is a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Prof. Naomi Ginsberg. His research focuses on imaging the environmental response of soft materials outside of equilibrium, exploring a range of phenomena including fluctuations, transport, and phase transformations. He earned his PhD from the University of Chicago, studying block copolymer self-assembly under the supervision of Prof. Steven Sibener. Jonathan is the recipient of the Charles H. Viol Fellowship and an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Congrats to Jeremy Thurston for Receiving the Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Award at Frontiers in Optics

Every year, the Frontiers in Optics conference holds the Emil Wolf Outstanding Student Paper Competition, acknowledging the excellence of students in presenting their work at the conference in both paper and poster form. This year, JILA graduate student Jeremy Thurston of the Murnane and Kapteyn research groups showcased his work in both a paper and presentation titled: “Bright Tunable Ultrafast Deep- and Vacuum-Ultraviolet Harmonic Combs,” which was awarded a prize by the judges for excellence in communication.

“I’m very honored to be selected by the FiO committee for this award and want to extend my congratulations to the many collaborators at JILA and KMLabs that contributed to this work,” stated Thurston about the award. Congratulations, Jeremy!

Congrats to Daniel Carlson for Receiving the Best Paper Award at Optica International Conference on Advanced Solid State Lasers

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!

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About Lauren Mason