Plenary speakers

Wolfgang Baumeister, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany
Title: Electron-Cryomicroscopy: From molecules to cells
Wolfgang Baumeister studied biology, chemistry and physics at the Universities of Münster and Bonn, Germany, and he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Düsseldorf in 1973. From 1973-1980 he was Research Associate in the Department of Biophysics at the University of Düsseldorf. He held a Heisenberg Fellowship spending time at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England. In 1982 he became a Group Leader at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biochemistry in Martinsried, Germany and in 1988 Director and Head of the Department of Structural Biology. He is also an Honorary Professor on the Physics Faculty at the Technical University in Munich.
Wolfgang Baumeister made seminal contributions to our understanding of the structure and function of the cellular machinery of protein degradation, in particular the proteasome. Moreover, he pioneered the development of cryo-electron tomography. His contributions to science were recognized by numerous awards including the Otto Warburg Medal, the Schleiden Medal, the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine, the Stein and Moore Award, the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology and the Ernst Schering Prize. He is a member of several academies including the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.


Archie Howie, University of Cambridge, UK
Title: Fighting Coulomb's Singularity and Johnson's Noise
After graduating in physics from the University of Edinburgh (B.Sc., 1956) and spending a year at the feet of Feynman and Gell-Mann in Cal. Tech. (M.S., 1957), Archie Howie joined Peter Hirsch and Mike Whelan in Cambridge to develop diffraction contrast electron microscopy (Ph.D., 1961). This work led to the book known as the Yellow Bible where he was one of the five authors. Closely related topics of his subsequent activity included electron channelling, weak beam imaging and preservation of coherent contrast effects after inelastic scattering. An educational; but otherwise not very successful, attempt to apply HREM to the imaging of amorphous structures followed. With Mick Brown, he acquired in Cambridge one of the earliest models of the VG STEM and, through the application of this to catalyst studies by Mike Treacy, the idea for HAADF imaging emerged. Its full power was not however apparent until atomic resolution STEM capability was achieved, notably by Steve Pennycook and colleagues at Oak Ridge. The STEM also proved to be an excellent platform for pioneering studies in spatially-resolved EELS, aloof beam spectroscopy, and secondary electron emission. Archie's recent interests have focused on various methods of combining the spatial resolution of electron imaging with the spectral advantages of photons. This history, and even more importantly the list of Archie's students with subsequent distinguished careers in electron microscopy, demonstrates the attractions and opportunities that the subject holds for the physicist. Professor Howie was elected to the Royal Society in 1978 and received the Royal Medal in 1999. His honours also include the MSA Distinguished Scientist Award (1991) and the Guthrie Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics (1992). He was head of the Cavendish Laboratory from 1989-1997.


Pratibha Gai, University of York, UK
Title: Atomic Resolution Environmental Transmission Electron Microscopy (ETEM and ESTEM)
Pratibha Gai is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and in the Department of Physics, JEOL Professor of Electron Microscopy and Co-Director of the Nanocentre at the University of York since 2007. After graduating with a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge she founded and led the Surface Reactions Group in the Department of Materials, University of Oxford. She subsequently held positions as DuPont Research Fellow at the Central Research and Development Laboratories, DuPont, USA and concurrently as an adjunct Professor of Materials Science at the University of Delaware, USA, before moving to York. At Oxford, she was awarded the Royal Society's Paul instrument fund award together with EPSRC and BP awards to develop in situ electron microscopy to study dynamic catalysis. She has pioneered the development of atomic resolution environmental (scanning) transmission electron microscopy (E(S) TEM) which enables the human eye to directly visualise gas molecule-solid catalyst surface chemical reactions at the atomic level, in collaboration with Prof Ed Boyes. The development is providing a better understanding of atomic scale chemical reactions leading to new antibiotics, environmentally friendly biofuels and improved industrial products. The atomic resolution-ETEM development is adopted for commercial production and used by numerous researchers worldwide. Her invention of a nanocoating process for durable pigments for coatings and high strength polymers is commercialised. Her honours for the scientific contributions include the 2010 Gabor Medal and Prize of the Institute of Physics and the 2013 L'Oreal-UNESCO Women in Science Award for excellence in the in Physical Sciences as the 2013 Laureate for Europe.

Invited speakers


Toshio Ando, Kanazawa University, Japan
Title: High-speed AFM for filming dynamic biological processes
Toshio Ando is a biophysicist specializing in the development and use of measurement techniques for understanding the functional mechanism of proteins. Toshio was born in Tokyo, Japan and received his B.E. in applied physics and his D.S. in physics from Waseda University, Tokyo. He is now Professor of Physics and Biophysics and Director of the Bio-AFM Frontier Research Center at Kanazawa University. Before joining the faculty at Kanazawa, he worked at UC San Francisco as a postdoctoral fellow and then an Assistant Research Biophysicist from 1980 to 1986. Professor Ando received a number of awards for his achievement on the development of HS-AFM technology and its application studies on biomolecular systems.


Sara Bals, University of Antwerp, Belgium
Title: Electron tomography for nanostructures: how low can we go?
Sara Bals is a senior lecturer at the University of Antwerp where she is part of the EMAT research group. Her main current research interest consists of the application and further development of quantitative and atomic resolution electron tomography for advanced nanostructured materials.


Edward D Boyes, University of York, UK
Title: Aberration Corrected Environmental STEM (AC ESTEM) for Dynamic in-situ Gas Reaction Studies of Nanoparticle Catalysts
Ed Boyes is Professor of Physics and Electronics and Co-Director, with Pratibha Gai, of the York JEOL Nanocentre at the University of York. His PhD is in Materials Science from Cambridge and he gained post-doc experience in the Cavendish, Materials Science at Cambridge and at Oxford before joining the staff there. His early research was in atomic resolution imaging and spectroscopic studies of metals and thin film systems using FIM imaging and spectroscopy; pioneering methods for lighter elements, especially aluminium and Al alloys, with extensive TEM in support. At Oxford he was involved with STEM and HRTEM developments, applications to structural materials and catalysts and early experiments in LVSEM, leading to a move to DuPont USA from 1988-2007. At DuPont, as well as running major analytical laboratory activities, Ed worked to develop modern high resolution low voltage SEM for both imaging (~1nm at 1kV) and <1nm sensitivity elemental microanalysis of functional thin films on sub-micron particle surfaces, and with Pratibha to develop and to apply the atomic resolution ETEM now widely used in commercial form. During this time Ed developed the DuPont corporate vision for Nanotechnology and served as a representative of US industry on the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for the review of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) by the US (Bush 2) President's Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), as well as on various committees for NSF, EPA and DoE. In 2007 Ed and Pratibha returned to the UK to develop the York JEOL Nanocentre and the flagship project to create in York the World's first full function double aberration corrected environmental scanning transmission electron microscope (AC ESTEM and AC ETEM) with sub-Angstrom resolution. This project now has major support from EPSRC, industrial applications and international partners; and it is in the process of introducing a collaborative new research capability in the UK. All the activities, including at York, are differentiated by a willingness and ability to add functionality to complex instruments - including making major changes - in pursuit of new scientific capabilities. Ed has presented invited papers, in many cases multiple times, at conferences in 17 countries, including several times at EMAG; on the full range of topics on which he has worked - and at times this has led to timetabling complications for conference organisers!


Mick Brown, University of Cambridge, UK
Title: Expunging Diffraction Contrast: EELS and HAADF in STEM
Canadian by birth, Prof. Brown has applied electron microscopy to problems in solid state physics since 1960. He was Chair of EMAG 1983-1985 and played a pivotal role in the establishment and early management of the SuperSTEM at Daresbury. He now works on models of dislocation plasticity.


José Calvino, University of Cádiz, Spain
Title: Understanding CO interaction with Au/Ceria-Zirconia catalysts
Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Cádiz, Spain, and currently President of the Spanish Society of Microscopy. Since 2004 he has been leading the Electron Microscopy Facilities at the University of Cádiz. His research career has focused on the development of Advanced Electron Microscopy methodologies for the atomic scale analysis of nanomaterials, which have been applied to the study of a wide spectrum of lanthanide containing systems of interest in Environmental Catalysis. Exploiting the highly varied possibilities of electron microscopy techniques to understand in detail the chemical aspects of the synthesis, function and deactivation of Ceria-based catalysts is the topic underlying most of his scientific production.


Pedro Galindo, University of Cádiz, Spain
Title: A methodology for the extraction of quantitative information from electron microscopy images at the atomic level
Pedro L. Galindo obtained his Ph.D. from the Polytechnic University of Madrid in 1995 and is currently Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and the leader of the Intelligent Systems group at the University of Cadiz, Spain. Since 2007 he is also the technical director of the Supercomputing facilities at the university.
He is the author of the Peak Pairs Analysis (PPA) software for the detection of peak intensity analysis and local strain map calculation from high-resolution electron microscopy images, and also co-author of the Quantitative HAADF Analysis (qHAADF) package for the determination of column-to-column compositional analysis of materials from the integrated intensities of an atomic-column resolved HAADF-STEM image. His main research interest consists on the development of software for nanostructure modeling, electron microscopy image simulation of large nanostructures and extraction of quantitative information (size, 3D shape, composition, strain...) from electron microscopy images at the atomic level. He is now actively working on atomic resolution electron tomography for nanostructured materials.


Peter Hartel, Corrected Electron Optical Systems (CEOS) Gmbh, Germany
Title: Cc-correction: status and key applications
Diploma thesis (conditions and reasons for incoherent imaging in STEM) and PhD thesis (mirror corrector for low-voltage electron microscopes) at Prof. Harald Rose, Darmstadt, Germany.
Since 2001 scientist R&D at CEOS GmbH, Heidelberg, Germany: Development of prototype aberration correctors.


Yuichi Ikuhara, University of Tokyo, Japan Fine Ceramic Centre and Tohoku University, Japan
Title: Atom-resolved imaging and chemistry of grain boundaries with segregation
Yuichi Ikuhara is Professor and Director of Nanotechnology Center, Institute of Engineering Innovation at University of Tokyo. He received Dr.Eng. from Department of Materials Science, Kyushu University. He then joined Japan Fine Ceramics Center (JFCC) in 1988. In 1996, he joined University of Tokyo. His current research interest is in interface and grain boundary phenomena, transmission electron microscopy (STEM, HREM, EDS, EELS), high-temperature ceramics, dislocations, bicrystal experiments, theoretical calculations, and so on. Dr.Ikuhara is author and coauthor of about 450 technical papers in the field, and has more than 220 invited talks at international and domestic conferences. He has received "Humboldt Research Award" from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2011), "Honda Frontier Prize" from Honda Foundation (2010) and so on. He is a member of an associate member of the Science Council of Japan, and holds a group leader position at JFCC and WPI professor at Tohoku University concurrently.


Ondrej Krivanek, Nion Company, USA
Title: Advances in monochromated STEM
Ondrej Krivanek was born in Prague, Czech Republic, received his B.Sc. from Leeds University and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and did post-doctoral studies in Japan and USA. He then became a professor of Physics at Arizona State University, and later Director of Research at Gatan in California. He spent 1995 to 1997 designing and building a STEM aberration corrector in Cambridge, UK, and in 1997 he co-founded Nion Co. near Seattle, USA. He is currently President of Nion and Adjunct Professor of Physics at Arizona State University. Ondrej is known for his research in high resolution electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy, and for the many instruments he and his team have introduced: energy loss spectrometers and imaging filters (Gatan PEELS and Gatan GIF), CCD cameras, DigitalMicrograph software, aberration correctors for STEM, a whole scanning transmission electron microscope (Nion UltraSTEM) and most recently, a high-performance monochromated EELS STEM system.

Roland Kroeger, University of York, UK
Title: Hard-soft matter composites: In situ studies of the growth dynamics with electron microscopy in liquids
Dr. Roland Kröger obtained his Physics diploma and PhD at the University of Hamburg/Germany. After a postdoctoral period at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, a Research Fellow position at the University of Bremen/Germany and a Visiting Professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was appointed Lecturer at the University of York in 2007. His research interest lies in the field of Materials Science and Physics using electron microscopy based characterisation techniques with a special focus on hard-soft matter interfaces and composites relevant for many biological materials.


Laurence D Marks, Northwestern University, USA
Title: Correlated structure-optical property studies of plasmonic nanoparticles
Professor Laurence D. Marks, Ph.D. is a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. His most highly cited work is the discovery of a type of nanoparticle which has become known as the Marks Decahedron. His research interests include transmission electron microscopy, density functional theory methods, direct methods for inversion of diffraction data, surface science particularly of oxides, tribology and hip replacements as well as nanoparticle structure, growth and plasmonic properties. He is the author or co-author of approximately 300 refereed publications


Valeria Nicolosi, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Title: Processing and aberration-corrected imaging of inorganic two-dimensional nanostructures
Prof. Valeria Nicolosi is internationally regarded as a leading expert in the field of processing of low-dimensional nanostructures and high-end electron microscopy. She received a BSc with honors in Chemistry from the University of Catania (Italy) in 2001 and a Ph.D. in Physics in 2006 from the University of Dublin, Trinity College (TCD). She then worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the group of Prof. Coleman until December 2007. During this time, among other things, she described in a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology a method for the high-throughput exfoliation of graphene in solution (>800 citations to date). This method for producing graphene is currently being commercialised. In 2008 she moved to the University of Oxford with a Marie Curie IEF fellowship (PEPINEN). Later in 2008 she was also awarded a UK Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Fellowship. This fellowship provided a total of GBP825,000 funding for 5 years starting on March 2009, allowing independence in research and the opportunity to form a research group. RAEng/EPSRC Fellowships "are designed to promote excellence in engineering. They provide support for outstanding scientists and encourage them to develop successful academic research careers". The primary aim of the research funded by this scheme was to address crucial problems such as processability and high-end characterisation of low-dimensional nanomaterials. During her 4 years in Oxford she developed as world-class electron-microscopist publishing more than 30 papers in major peer-reviewed international journals. In particular, in a landmark paper in Nature in 2010, she demonstrated that aberration-corrected electron microscopy can be used to image and identify with 99% accuracy individual atoms in two-dimensional crystals. Nature recognized the significance of this work by giving it the prized cover spot. In addition, in a ground-breaking work published in Science in 2011, she extended the liquid-phase exfoliation of graphene to a wide range of other two-dimensional nanomaterials. This paper is currently the most cited Science paper from 2011 and the fourth most cited paper in chemistry for the two-month period of May to June 2012 - validation of the novelty and topicality of the work. In view of her considerable scientific expertise in 2009 she was asked by the European Research Council to act as a reviewer for Advanced Grants, Starting Grants and Synergy Grants funding (PE5) until 2014. This constituted significant recognition for such an early stage researcher, whose PhD had just been awarded only 3 years before.
In July 2010 the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford selected her as Oxford's single nominee for a place at the Science and Technology in Society (STS) Forum 2010. A group of eight scientists representing Asia, America, Europe and Africa were selected by the New York Academy of Sciences to attend the STS Forum, which gathered top international policymakers, business executives, scientists and media. The selected scientists were "40 years of age or younger. Every one of them is an outstanding, outspoken and visionary young scientist whose research plays an important role in societal development". In 2011 she was awarded a highly competitive starting grant worth €1.5M from the European Research Council (ERC) to expand her work in nanomaterials. In January 2012 she returned to Trinity College Dublin, becoming ERC Research Professor at the Schools of Chemistry and Physics and principal investigator in CRANN. Prof. Nicolosi is one of the 10 PIs in the newly established Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research Centre (AMBER) and she is director of the new National Centre for Aberration-Corrected Electron Microscopy in Ireland. She is furthermore adjunct visiting professor at the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford until 2017. In the past 10 years Prof. Nicolosi has published more than 70 papers in high-profile international journals (h-index: 27, sum of Times Cited: 3673) and delivered more than 40 invited presentations at major conferences/institutions/public understanding of science events. In September 2012 I was awarded the 2012 RDS/Intel Prize Lecture for Nanoscience in recognition of my contribution to the field. From March 2012 she is an editor and the Materials Characterization representative of Materials Today.


Kunio Takayanagi, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Title: In-situ study on phases of lithium ion battery electrodes at 50pm resolution


Jian-Min Zuo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Title: Unraveling the mystery of complex nanostructures in functional materials by Scanning Electron Nanodiffraction (SEND)
Professor Jian-Min Zuo received his Ph.D. in Physics from Arizona State University in 1989. Prior to joining the faculty at University of Illinois, He was a research scientist in Physics at ASU and a visiting scientist at a number of universities and institutes in Germany, Japan, China and Norway. Zuo is the recipient of the 2001 Burton Award of the Microscopy Society of America, NSF career award in 2005 and Outstanding Overseas Young Scientist Collaboration Award from NSF of China in 2007. He is currently a Professor and Racheff scholar in the department of materials science and engineering and F. Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.