As told to Andrew Myers
In graduate school I wanted to study engineering physics because I’m very competitive and it was considered the hardest program. I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, which is an oil town. I was 100% sure I was going into the petroleum industry.
Then, I got an internship in a scientific lab, and I knew at that moment I would become a scientist. I did a PhD in the same research group in materials engineering and chemical engineering, but very much focused on atomic-scale synthesis and characterization.
I now use computer algorithms to analyze data and simulate quantum mechanical materials before creating and testing them in the real world. When I or another researcher designs a new material on a computer and then tries to synthesize it, we can use electron microscopy to visualize down to the individual atom to answer a simple but important question: “Did we make what we wanted to make?” We use our computational models to predict the arrangement of atoms in the material and then simulate what an electron microscopy experiment would look like if we have succeeded. If the two match up, the real world and the simulated, then we know we have synthesized the material we were hoping to create.
We also do what I call inverse modeling. If we have a promising real-world material that is a mystery to us, we use electron microscopy experiments to try to figure out its atomic structure – to study it, to understand it, and to recreate it later if we want.
Most of the materials that my group analyzes are for sustainability applications – new solar materials, battery electrolytes, recyclable polymers, and so on. Because batteries, electrolytes, polymers, and even biological molecules are incredibly fragile, we have to design experiments that are incredibly gentle, and that is hard to do. My specialty in electron microscopy and my motivation as a scientist is developing ways to look at these so-called beam-sensitive soft materials in ways that don’t harm them. That’s my main connection to sustainability – as many of these materials are used in energy applications.
For the last 12 years, I was a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the National Center for Electron Microscopy. My job there was 50% independent research and 50% running the Molecular Foundry user facility where any researcher with an idea can come to us for help. I’m excited about joining Stanford, because education is the other important part of what I want to do. I currently travel the world teaching workshops on my group’s methods, our experiments, our software, and our data analysis. Education is as important as research. No method we develop is worth anything unless we can teach it to the next generation. For that, Stanford is the best possible place and an amazing opportunity for me.
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