News

Home \ News

Tracking long-range energy flow on its native nanometer and picosecond scales

In a new study, appearing in the November 2017 issue of Nature Materials, a research team led by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Naomi S. Ginsberg, has announced the development and implementation of the most direct method to-date to track the nanoscale process of energy flow that punctuates the initial picoseconds after light absorption in some natural and artificial light harvesting systems. The research results are also available online at the Nature Materials website.

Bjoern Enders, Physics Postdoctoral Fellow

Bjoern Enders joined the ALS as a postdoc in July 2016. He first worked on Beamline 5.3.2.1 before moving to Beamline 7.0.1 (COSMIC) when 5.3.2.1 was disassembled and the ptychography program was moved in the summer of 2017. His research is part of the NSF Science and Technology Center STROBE.

Three UCI School of Physical Sciences Faculty Earn Prestigious NSF Early Career Awards

Franklin Dollar, Ph.D., assistant professor for the Department of Physics and Astronomy, was awarded the prestigious five-year NSF grant valuing at $680,000 for his project titled CAREER: Coherent Laser Control for Compact Accelerators.

Dollar’s project supports a study of how to coherently control the physics of laser-driven particle accelerators by manipulating laser properties such as the laser wavefront. Advanced particle accelerators based on lasers have the potential to dramatically reduce the size and duration of such sources, and could have immediate applications in medical isotope production and radiography. This award will also support development of the Culturally relevant Accelerator Research and Engineering for Native Americans (CARE-NA) program, which will train students with broad practical skillsets with ties to community and culture.

“This project is one of those high-risk, high-return endeavors the NSF Division of Physics is particularly fond of supporting,” said National Science Foundation program officer Vyacheslav Lukin, who oversees Dollar’s CAREER grant. “We will look forward to seeing Dollar take this research from studies of underlying plasma physics and optics to breakthroughs that may enable tabletop accelerators — and their high-impact practical applications.”

“Accelerator science, and physics as a whole, can benefit tremendously from increased diversity and broad engagement with the public,” shared Dollar. “At UCI we wish to continue to lead in this arena across physical sciences.”

Congrats to Franklin Dollar for Receiving an NSF CAREER Award

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested $150 million in 307 early career engineering and computer science faculty to advance fields from intelligent infrastructure and collaborative robots to secure communications and brain-related technologies.

Over the next five years, each researcher will receive up to $500,000 from NSF to build a firm scientific footing for solving challenges and scaling new heights for the nation, as well as serve as academic role models in research and education.

Congrats to Jose Rodriguez on Being Selected as a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences

UCLA chemistry professor Jose Rodriguez has been selected among 22 Pew scholars in the biomedical sciences for 2018. The honor provides funding to outstanding young researchers whose work is relevant to the advancement of human health. The scholars, who were selected from 184 nominations, will receive four-year, $300,000 grants to advance their explorations of biological mechanisms underpinning human health and disease.

Berkeley Lab Paves the Way for Real-time Ptychographic Data Streaming

CAMERA/ALS/STROBE Collaboration Yields Novel Image Data Workflow Pipeline. Now an inter-government agency funded collaboration of scientists from Berkeley Lab’s DOE-funded Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA), the ALS and STROBE, the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Center, has yielded another first-of-its-kind advance for ptychographic imaging: a software/algorithmic pipeline that enables real-time streaming of ptychographic image data during a beamline experiment, providing throughput, compression and resolution as well as rapid feedback to the user while the experiment is still running.

Go to Top