Staff Scientist, Imaging and Manipulation of Nanostructures
araja@lbl.gov
510.486.5337
Education
Integrated M.Sc. Chemistry, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
Ph.D. Chemical Physics, Columbia University
Postdoctoral Scholar, Applied Physics, Stanford University
Heising-Simons Junior Fellow, Kavli ENSI, UC Berkeley
Research Interests
Dr. Raja studies how interfaces control the flow and transformation of energy, charge, and information in quantum materials. Her group pairs optical spectroscopy and microscopy, including femtosecond techniques, with ultrafast electron diffraction and electron energy-loss spectroscopy to study interfaces as they really are, including their defects, strain, disorder, and atomic reconstruction. Current materials of interest include atomically thin semiconductors and the van der Waals and moiré heterostructures the group assembles from them. Recent highlights include the first sub-nanometer imaging of excitons within a single moiré unit cell and revealing how charge transfer across a 2D interface hands energy to the lattice. With collaborators, Dr. Raja is also developing AI agents that reason across multimodal instrument data and help decide what to measure next. She is co-PI of the UC AI at Scale initiative LEAP and of the DOE Genesis Mission projects. The group’s instruments are available to researchers worldwide through the Molecular Foundry user program.
