Awards

Theory Facility Director Jeff Neaton has received the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. LEARN MORE

Inorganic Facility Director Delia Milliron and her colleagues have received R&D Magazine’s prestigious R&D 100 Award for 2009, for developing nanocrystal solar cells—"the only solar cells that are long lasting and inexpensive enough to produce cost-competitive electricity." LEARN MORE

Frantisek Svec, Facility Director of the Foundry's Organic and Macromolecular Synthesis Facility, has received the 2009 Dal Nogare Award in chromotography. Named in honor of Dr. Stephen Dal Nogare, who was one of the founders of the Chromatography Forum and its second president, this annual award is presented to an outstanding scientist in the field of chromatography. It is one of the premier awards in separation science. LEARN MORE

Increasing the speed of atomic force microscopy (AFM)

Foundry scientists Paul Ashby and Jim DeYoreo, along with University of California, Los Angeles mathematics professor Andrea Bertozzi, received a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Cyber‐Enabled Discovery and Innovation initiative to increase the imaging speed accessible through atomic force microscopy (AFM). In traditional AFM, a complete raster scan of the image area is performed, leading to wasted instrument time and unnecessary image analysis, since most of the image consists of uninteresting background. The proposed research will involve two graduate students who will develop algorithms and corresponding hardware to ‘direct’ the AFM to follow features and interpret the resultant image. Ashby and colleagues hope to use this technique to study kinetic processes currently inaccessible through AFM such as oxidation and self‐assembly; the team anticipates imaging rates 30 times those of traditional AFM instruments.