Each year, the FIU community comes together to celebrate and acknowledge esteemed staff and faculty members for their remarkable accomplishments and dedicated years of service at our FIU Service and Recognition Awards.
Prof. Jessica Ramella-Roman has been recognized as an SPIE Community Champion for her outstanding volunteerism with the Society in 2019 and 2020.
The distinction is awarded to SPIE members to recognize their commitment to SPIE, its mission, and the broader optics and photonics community.
SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics, an educational not-for-profit organization founded in 1955 to advance light-bsed science, engineering, and technology. The society serves 257,000 constituents from 173 countries, offering conference and their published proceedings, continuing education, books, journals, and the SPIE Digital Library.
Tanner works on self-assembling nanocrystals, which could be the basis for less expensive, easier to build displays and solar cells.
What Christian Tanner wants to do, ultimately, is help create materials that could be applied to building better solar cells or video displays — and to do that big-picture work, he coaxes nanoscopically tiny building blocks to put themselves together and watches the process unfold using X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.
For his efforts, Tanner will receive the 2024 SSRL Scientific Development Award, to be presented at the SSRL/LCLS User’s Meeting taking place September 22-27. The award comes with $1,000 to help promote the dissemination of research performed at SSRL.
The University of California today (April 8) announced its fifth class of UC President’s Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings Fellows, 27 highly accomplished young scientists awarded the opportunity to join Nobel laureates from around the globe at the 2024 Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Germany.
“We are thrilled to provide some of the University’s most promising scientists the opportunity to attend this one-of-a-kind scholarly summit,” said UC President Michael V. Drake, M.D. “Promoting innovation and discovery, and fostering international collaboration, are foundational to the University of California’s mission of teaching, research and public service.”
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:
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.
One of the first experimenters at the new flagship US laser, Michigan alum Franklin Dollar’s mission is bigger than research.
When the first beam of light ran through a laser system that will be the most powerful in the U.S., it was delivered to an experiment designed by an old hand at U-M’s Center for Ultrafast Optical Sciences.
As a graduate student in the late 2000s, Franklin Dollar (MSE Electrical Engineering ’10, PhD Applied Physics ’12) built experiments at HERCULES, the most intense laser in the world at the time. HERCULES has now been upcycled into ZEUS, the Zetawatt-Equivalent Ultra-short laser pulse System—which will offer triple the power of the next largest US lasers. Its peak power is three petawatts, or more than 100 times global electricity production, but only for a few quintillionths of a second.
Dollar has stayed connected with the lab, leading experiments in late 2022, early 2023 and January this year that the ZEUS team used to work out the bugs in the system. Then earlier this month, he led ZEUS’s first official experiment in the flagship target area, where the signature zetawatt-equivalent experiments will take place.
The Philomathia Prize has been presented annually since 2022 to an early-career Berkeley faculty member, from any discipline, who demonstrates great distinction and promise in their academic field. The prize, established through a generous endowment gift from the Philomathia Foundation, comes with a monetary award of $200,000 for use at the awardee’s discretion over a three-year period.
New tool removes motion artifacts when imaging dynamic samples. Imaging microscopic samples requires capturing multiple, sequential measurements, then using computational algorithms to reconstruct a single, high-resolution image. This process can work well when the sample is static, but if it’s moving — as is common with live, biological specimens — the final image may be blurry or distorted.
Now, Berkeley researchers have developed a method to improve temporal resolution for these dynamic samples. In a study published in Nature Methods, they demonstrated a new computational imaging tool, dubbed the neural space-time model (NSTM), that uses a small, lightweight neural network to reduce motion artifacts and solve for the motion trajectories.
Laura Waller, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at University of California Berkeley, has been awarded the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal for her outstanding achievements in computational microscopy.
Prof. Waller uses algorithms – some of which are based on machine learning – to improve microscopy, particularly of biological samples, as well as the imaging of astronomical objects. This pioneer of computational microscopy is combining computer science and simple instruments to achieve such things as making more details visible and creating three-dimensional images or videos. Among other things, Laura Waller has further developed the phase contrast microscope, which can also image transparent objects. She has formulated algorithms that determine quantitative information about the phase of light waves – in simple terms, this is the displacement of light waves relative to each other– from a few images with illumination from different angles. The resulting images not only better visualise the shape of cells, but also allow better cell tracking. In another invention, the DiffuserCam, Waller places an uneven plastic plate on a light sensor, which scatters the incoming light. Very detailed 3D images can then be reconstructed from a single sensor reading, with applications in microscopy and astronomical imaging. The technology also makes it possible to create high-speed videos with low-speed camera equipment.
The MIND (Magnetic Interfaces and Nanostructures Division) Postdoctoral Award recognizes outstanding contributions to the areas of interest to MIND. The award comes with a certificate and a cash prize for the winner. Congratulations to Dr. Thomas Feggeler for receiving this award!