STROBE Awards

Mary Rippon, the first CU female professor, and Lucile B. Buchanan, the first African-American woman to graduate from CU, paved the way for women to succeed. These influential women were the first to accomplish what they did, but women who deserve appreciation surround us every day. The 2019 class of Women Who Make a Difference impact our community by serving as teachers, mentors, mothers and advocates. They write, they blog, they include and make countless other contributions big and small.

Catherine Groschner of Mary Scott’s research group at the University of California, Berkeley was awarded a 2019 M&M Student Scholar Award for her presentation titled, “Machine Learning for High Throughput HRTEM Analysis”.

The Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences provides funding to young investigators of outstanding promise in science relevant to the advancement of human health. The program makes grants to selected academic institutions to support the independent research of outstanding individuals who are in their first few years of their appointment at the assistant professor level. Congratulations to Ke Xu for being selected as a Pew Innovation Fund Investigator!

Laura Waller has been selected as a 2019 AIMBE Fellow. The College of Fellows – 2,000 individuals who are outstanding bioengineers in academia, industry, clinical practice, and government. These leaders in the field have distinguished themselves through their contributions in research, industrial practice and/or education. Fellows are nominated each year by their peers and represent the top 2% of the medical and biological engineering community. They are considered the life-blood of AIMBE and work towards realizing AIMBE’s vision to provide medical and biological engineering innovation for the benefit of humanity.

In 2019, David Cesar received the Particle Accelerator Science & Technology (PAST) Doctoral Student Award from IEEE for contributions to dielectric laser accelerators and time-resolved electron microscopy.

Namrata is a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, pursuing a Physics (Honors) degree. Her senior thesis, supervised by Professor Naomi Ginsberg, involves understanding the dynamics of self assembly of gold nanocrystal superlattices using optical and x-ray scattering techniques. She has also worked on studying the trajectories of electrons in manganese doped halide perovskites using Monte Carlo simulations.

Rafael Piestun for received the 2019 Lab Venture Challenge Award for Ultrathin Endoscopes. Through the Lab Venture Challenge, Venture Partners at CU Boulder funds the top innovations showing high commercial potential, a clear path to a compelling market, and strong scientific support. In just the last 3 years, more than 20 commercially promising projects at CU Boulder have received funding through this program. Those same awards are associated with 16 new startup companies, with many having already raised further capital, demonstrating a powerful way to advance innovative research and translate it into impactful business ventures.

Winners of the R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World magazine and its new parent company, WTWH Media, LLC. “This awards program is so well recognized across the R&D community. Being named as one of the R&D 100 is an incredible honor,” said Paul J. Heney, Vice President, Editorial Director for R&D World. “These 100 winning products and technologies are the disruptors that will change industries and make the world a better place in the coming years.”

Analytical/Test Category:

QM Quantum Microscope – Next Generation Microscopy & Analysis
KMLabs, Inc.
JILA at the University of Colorado, the STROBE center

The editors of Microscopy Today congratulate the winners of the tenth Microscopy Today Innovation Award competition. The ten innovations advance microscopy in several areas: light microscopy, electron microscopy, and scanning probe microscopy. These innovations will make microscopy and microanalysis more powerful, more productive, and easier to accomplish.Secondary Electron Electron-BeamInduced-Current (SEEBIC) Imaging University of California at Los Angeles Developers: Chris Regan and William Hubbard. While intimately related to prior electron-beaminduced-current (EBIC) methods in the SEM, secondary electron electron-beaminduced-current (SEEBIC) imaging is qualitatively and quantitatively different. What makes the SEEBIC system new is that both the secondary electron (SE) and hole signals are detected in a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM). SEEBIC differs from traditional EBIC in several ways. The measuring circuits are wired differently. In the former case the end of the device remote from the transimpedance amplifier is extremely high impedance, while in the latter it is tied to a low impedance (usually ground) to allow charge neutralization. While traditional EBIC imaging is sensitive to holes, it only generates contrast in regions where the sample supports an electric field that will separate electron-hole pairs. In most samples such regions are special and localized, for example, in a p-n junction. Thus, most of the sample generates no contrast when imaged with traditional EBIC. SEEBIC, on the other hand, is an inevitable consequence of imaging a thin specimen with an energetic electron beam, and SEEBIC imaging generates contrast everywhere in a sample. SEEBIC imaging has not been demonstrated previously for a couple reasons. First, the typical SEM sample is electron-opaque, and primary beam absorption produces a large background; thus, the SEEBIC signal is buried in the noise of the traditional SEM EBIC apparatus. This background is largely absent in the electron-transparent samples used in STEM. Secondly, the secondary electron (SE) yield drops with increasing beam energy; therefore, the SE signal is even smaller in a 200 kV STEM than in a 30 kV SEM. Detection of the signal requires a current measuring system that is low-noise and protected from electromagnetic interference (1 pA EBIC corresponds to ∼6,000 electrons in a 1 ms dwell time). SEEBIC is sensitive to electric potential, electric field, work function, conductivity, and temperature, and it can probe these quantities with atomic resolution in a modern STEM. STEM SEEBIC can image a functioning resistive random access memory (RRAM). For example, in a HfO2-based RRAM, the conducting filament is thought to consist of oxygen vacancies. Oxygen vacancies are basically invisible in a standard STEM image, but they give excellent contrast when viewed with STEM EBIC imaging.

On Thursday, September 26, Workforce Development & Education hosted our annual Mentor Appreciation event where we recognized our outstanding mentors and STEM partners. This event highlighted accomplishments for FY2018. Outstanding 2018 STEM Partner is hereby awarded on this 26th day of September 2019, to Jessie Woodcock, in recognition of partnership and support of Workforce Development & Education programs.