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Congrats to Hong Zhou for Being Named a 2024 Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology

Congratulations to professor Hong Zhou on being named a 2024 fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology! In addition to his role as a professor at UCLA MIMG, Zhou is the faculty director of the Electron Imaging Center for NanoMachines (EICN), part of the CNSI Technology Centers.

In Feb., the American Academy of Microbiology (Academy) elected 65 new fellows to the Class of 2024. Fellows of the American Academy of Microbiology, the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology, are elected annually through a highly selective, peer-review process, based on their records of scientific achievement and original contributions that have advanced microbiology. The Academy received 156 nominations for fellowship this year. There are over 2,600 fellows in the Academy representing all subspecialties of the microbial sciences and who are involved in basic and applied research, teaching, public health, industry and government service.

Congrats to Kwabena Bediako for Being Awarded a 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry

Congratulations to the Sloan Research Fellows of 2024. The following 126 early-career scholars represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Winners receive $75,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research.

Research efforts in the Bediako Group involve the mesoscopic investigation of interfacial charge transfer and charge transport in two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures. We emphasize the design of materials with modular interfaces that can be controlled at atomically precise length scales to study and overcome contemporary challenges in electrochemical energy conversion and quantum electronics.

3D atomic details of next-generation alloys revealed for first time

Alloys, which are materials such as steel that are made by combining two or more metallic elements, are among the underpinnings of contemporary life. They are essential for buildings, transportation, appliances and tools — including, very likely, the device you are using to read this story. In applying alloys, engineers have faced an age-old trade-off common in most materials: Alloys that are hard tend to be brittle and break under strain, while those that are flexible under strain tend to dent easily.

Possibilities for sidestepping that trade-off arose about 20 years ago, when researchers first developed medium- and high-entropy alloys, stable materials that combine hardness and flexibility in a way in which conventional alloys do not. (The “entropy” in the name indicates how disorderly the mixture of the elements in the alloys is.)

Congrats to Nicholas Jenkins for Being Named as the 2024 Recipient of the SPIE Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship

Nicholas Jenkinshas been announced as the 2024 recipient of the $10,000 Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, and Siemens EDA — formally Mentor, a Siemens company — for potential contributions to advanced lithography or a related field. Jenkins will also be honored during 2024’s SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning conference.

The Nick Cobb scholarship recognizes an exemplary graduate student working in the field of lithography for semiconductor manufacturing. The award honors the memory of Nick Cobb, who was an SPIE Senior Member and chief engineer at Mentor. His groundbreaking contributions enabled optical and process proximity correction for IC manufacturing. Originally funded for three years ending in 2021, the Nick Cobb Scholarship will be awarded to one student annually for an additional period of three years, through 2024.

Jenkins is pursuing a PhD in Physics at JILA and the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU). His research, under the guidance of Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, focuses on the precise fabrication and metrology of nanomaterials and devices to advance science and technology in areas such as nanoelectronics and metamaterials. As a final-year PhD student, Jenkins leads several experimental campaigns to use extreme ultraviolet (EUV) scatterometry and imaging in order to more precisely measure the structure and composition of nanoscale objects. Jenkins received his BS in Physics, summa cum laude, from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, in 2018, and his MS in Physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2021. He won the 2022 Colorado Photonics Industry Student Poster Contest, is currently working on projects for Samsung, 3M, and the Moore Foundation, and excels in his commitment to mentoring others.

“I’m honored to receive the Nick Cobb Memorial Scholarship and I’m excited for the opportunity to share my research with others in the field at the upcoming SPIE Advanced Lithography + Patterning meeting,” notes Jenkins. “The metrology community has continued to help push forward what humans are capable of on the nanoscale, and I’m glad to be part of the effort.”

‘Doughnut’ beams help physicists see incredibly small objects

In a new study, researchers at CU Boulder have used doughnut-shaped beams of light to take detailed images of objects too tiny to view with traditional microscopes.

The new technique could help scientists improve the inner workings of a range of “nanoelectronics,” including the miniature semiconductors in computer chips. The discovery was highlighted Dec. 1 in a special issue of Optics & Photonics News called Optics in 2023.

The research is the latest advance in the field of ptychography, a difficult to pronounce (the “p” is silent) but powerful technique for viewing very small things. Unlike traditional microscopes, ptychography tools don’t directly view small objects. Instead, they shine lasers at a target, then measure how the light scatters away—a bit like the microscopic equivalent of making shadow puppets on a wall.

So far, the approach has worked remarkably well, with one major exception, said study senior author and Distinguished Professor of physics Margaret Murnane.

“Until recently, it has completely failed for highly periodic samples, or objects with a regularly repeating pattern,” said Murnane, fellow at JILA, a joint research institute of CU Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). “It’s a problem because that includes a lot of nanoelectronics.”

High-Fidelity Ptychography of Highly Periodic Structures

Lensless imaging based on ptychographic coherent diffractive imaging enables diffraction-limited microscopy at short wavelengths, overcoming the limits of imperfect optics.1,2 Ptychographic imaging of highly periodic structures has been challenging, however, due to the lack of diversity in the recorded diffraction patterns, which leads to poor convergence of the reconstructed sample images. Although techniques (such as modulus enforced probe and total variation regularization) have been explored to address this challenge, they suffer from slow convergence, heavy reliance on constraints on the samples, or both. This significantly limits ptychography’s application to a wide variety of periodic structures in photonics, nanoelectronics and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) photomasks.

Congrats to Ruiming Cao for Receiving the Hitachi High-Tech Best Presentation Award at the SPIE Photonics West Conference

Hitatchi sponsors two High-Tech Best Presentation Awards in High-Speed Biomedical Imaging and Spectroscopy at the SPIE Photonics West Conference. Congratulations to Ruiming Cao for receiving this award in 2023!

Congrats to Jessica Ramella-Roman for Being Elected as a 2024 Optica Fellow

Jessica Ramella-Roman has been elected as a Fellow of Optica for her pioneering contributions to the study of polarized light transport in biological media through experimental and computational approaches.

The Board of Directors of  Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide, recently elected 129 members from 26 countries to the Society’s 2024 Fellow Class. Optica Fellows are selected based on several factors, including outstanding contributions to research, business, education, engineering and service to Optica and our community.

Fellows are Optica members who have served with distinction in the advancement of optics and photonics. The Fellow Members Committee, led by Chair Ofer Levi, University of Toronto, Canada, reviewed 216 nominations submitted by current Fellows. The Committee extends its thanks to all of this year’s nominators and references. As Fellows can account for no more than 10 percent of the total membership, the election process is highly competitive. Candidates are recommended by the Fellow Members Committee and approved by the Awards Council and Board of Directors.

The new Fellows will be honored at Optica conferences and events throughout 2024.

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