News – Page 2

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.

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.

Congratulations to Jose Rodriguez for Receiving the Inaugural UCLA Academic Senate Service Rising Star Award

The UCLA Academic Senate selected Prof. Jose Rodriguez to receive the inaugural Academic Senate Service Rising Star Award. This award celebrates and recognizes UCLA Senate faculty who are in an early stage of their Senate service and have demonstrated a noteworthy contribution to the Academic Senate. A noteworthy contribution may include activities such as consistent and meaningful participation in committee or council meetings or projects; effective chairship of a subcommittee, special committee or task force; championing shared governance; or demonstrating Senate leadership potential. Preference is given to Senate members who have not yet chaired a standing committee or council. Current committee and council chairs, Senate Leadership and Senate staff are eligible to nominate candidates. Congratulations, Jose!

UCLA Scientists Break Imaging Barrier to Unlock Secrets of Deadly “Chaotic” Viruses

The findings could pave the way to new treatments for some of our most lethal diseases. For years, graduate student Lily Taylor and her advisor, Professor Jose Rodriguez, have been working on something big: a novel technique that would finally allow scientists to look closely at some of the most “chaotic” viruses in the world. Now, in Taylor’s first published paper as first author, they have done it…

Congratulations to Gabriella (Gabi) Seifert 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. The five-year fellowship provides three years of financial support including an annual stipend of $37,000.

Congratulations to Benjamin Hammel for receiving Best Poster Award at the Mountain States Society of Electron Microscopists (MSSEM) Fall 2024 Conference.

Benjamin Hammel, a graduate student in Gordana Dukovic’s group at CU Boulder, received the Best Poster Award at the Mountain States Society of Electron Microscopists (MSSEM) Fall 2024 Conference. Congratulations, Ben!

Congratulations to Jianwei (John) Miao for Being Elected as a 2025 Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS)

Professor John (Jianwei) Miao at UCLA has been elected as a 2025 Fellow of the Materials Research Society (MRS) for his research in pioneering coherent diffractive imaging for a wide range of material systems and atomic electron tomography for determining the three-dimensional atomic structure of crystal defects and amorphous materials. Congratulations, John!

Atomic imaging and AI offer new insights into motion of parasite behind sleeping sickness

UCLA discovery uncovers unique features that advance understanding of the microbe’s movement and infection. African sleeping sickness is a serious infection caused by a parasitic microbe called Trypanosoma brucei. Using an imaging technique called cryo-electron microscopy along with artificial intelligence, a team at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA mapped the hairlike flagellum that the microbe uses to propel itself, identifying 154 composite proteins. Findings revealed that the parasite moves in a distinctive style, similar to a dragon boat, with unique adaptations that are essential to its ability to infect its hosts.

An ultrafast microscope makes movies one femtosecond at a time

New CU Boulder research harnesses the power of an ultrafast microscope to study molecular movement in space and time.

The interactions in photovoltaic materials that convert light into electricity happens in femtoseconds. How fast is that? One femtosecond is a quadrillionth of a second. To put that in perspective, the difference between a second and a femtosecond is comparable to the difference between the second right now and 32 million years ago.

Subatomic particles like electrons move within atoms, and atoms move within molecules, in femtoseconds. This speed has long presented challenges for researchers working to make more efficient, cost-effective and sustainable photovoltaic materials, including solar cells. Imaging materials on the nanoscale with high enough spatial resolution to uncover the fundamental physical processes poses an additional challenge.

Understanding how, where and when electrons move, and how their movement depends on the molecular structure of these materials, is key to honing them or developing better ones.

Ultrafast nano-imaging of structure and dynamics in a perovskite quantum material also used for photovoltaic applications. Different femtosecond laser pulses are used to excite and measure the material. They are focused to the nanoscale with an ultrasharp metallic tip. The photo-excited electrons and coupled changes of the lattice structure (so called polarons, red ellipses) are diagnosed spectroscopically with simultaneous ultrahigh spatial and temporal resolution. (Illustration: Branden Esses)

Building on more than five years of research developing a unique ultrafast microscope that can make real-time “movies” of electron and molecular motion in materials, a team of University of Colorado Boulder scientists published in Science Advances the results of significant innovations in ultrafast nanoimaging, visualizing matter at its elementary atomic and molecular level.

The research team, led by Markus Raschke, professor of physics and JILA fellow, applied the ultrafast nanoimaging techniques they developed to novel perovskite materials. Perovskites are a family of organic-inorganic hybrid materials that are efficient at converting light to electricity, generally stable and relatively easy to make…

Congratulations to Anya Grafov for Receiving First Place for Lightning Talk at the MMM-Intermag Conference 2025

Anya Grafov, a graduate student in Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn’s research group, received first place for her Lightning Talk titled “Measuring Magnetic Dynamics with Extreme Ultraviolet Light” at the Joint MMM-Intermag Conference in 2025. Congratulations, Anya!