STROBE Awards

Graduate student Ho Leung Chan from Prof. Chris Regan’s research group at UCLA received a 2024 M&M Student Scholar Award! Her presentation is titled “Nano-PUND and STEM EBIC Imaging for Ferroelectric Polarization Mapping.”

The award consists of free registration for the meeting, $1000 travel support, and invitations to the Presidential Reception. Applicants must be bona fide students at a recognized college or university at the time of the meeting. Awards are based on the quality of the paper submitted for presentation at the meeting. The applicant must be the first author of the submitted paper. Successful applicants must present their papers personally at the meeting in order to receive the award.

Congratulations to Tristan O’Neill for receiving a 2024 M&M Student Poster Award for his poster titled, “Mapping Moiré Potentials with STEM EBIC Imaging.”

The AFRL/AFOSR Chief Scientist Distinguished Lecture Series selected Dr. Laura Waller, the Charles A. Desoer Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, as the 2024 AFOSR Chief Scientist Distinguished Lecturer. On March 21, 2024, from 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM ET, Dr. Waller delivered a talk titled “Computational Imaging, from Microscopes to Telescopes,” exploring the joint design of imaging system hardware and software for optimized data acquisition and reconstruction.

The APS DSOFT Emerging Soft Matter Excellence (ESME) Awardrecognizes an exceptional graduate student pursuing research in soft matter physics.

To be considered for the ESME Award the student must:

1. be a DSOFT member;
2. be currently pursuing a PhD;
3. not have completed the PhD requirements before the October 27, 2024 application deadline.

The DSOFT ESME committee will select 12 finalists who will be invited to give a 12-minute talk in a special DSOFT Early Career Awards Symposium at the March Meeting. Finalists will also be invited to a celebratory dinner with the DSOFT Chair and ESME Committee.

The Awards Symposium will be open to all March Meeting attendees and advertised broadly to DSOFT members. Following the Symposium, the ESME Committee will select the ESME Awardee based on the quality of the candidate’s research, their presentation, and their response to questions. The winner will be announced and recognized at the DSOFT Business Meeting, and will receive $250 honorarium.

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.

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.

Neerja Aggarwal’s poster titled “Spectral DiffuserScope: Compact Hyperspectral Imager for Fluorescence Microscopy” received a Second Place Poster Award at the Advanced Imaging Methods Workshop at the University of California Berkeley.

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.”