A delegation of MEM-C researchers traveled to PNNL for tours and facility tours last last Wednesday. The UW visiting group consisted of five PhD students from the De Yoreo, Gamelin, Idrobo, Mouradian, Rorrer, Xu, and Fu groups), one postdoc (Rorrer group) and De Yoreo, Gamelin, and Idrobo from the UW faculty side.
The visit featured a series of short talks by PNNL staff scientists, including Le Wang (thin films), Grant Johnson (chemical separations), Zbynek Novotny (scanning tunneling microscopy), Maxim Ziatdinov (AI/ML), Chongmin Wang (batteries and in-situ TEM), and Micah Prange (density functional theory). In addition, Scott Smith provided an overview of career opportunities at a national laboratory. MEM-C visitors also toured the laboratories in PNNL’s new Energy Sciences Center (ESC), which houses state-of-the-art instrumentation such as in-situ electron microscopes, an atom probe, molecular beam epitaxy and pulsed laser deposition chambers, a low-temperature scanning tunneling microscope, and a magnetic resonance spectrometer.
During the visit, Gamelin and Idrobo met with Novotny to discuss the feasibility of detecting Yb and measuring its spin state in a few-layer CrI3 encapsulated with BN/graphene. Novotny recommended reaching out to Dr. Percy Zahl at the Center for Functional Materials (CFM) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) due to the specialized requirements of such measurements. MEM-C also plans to invite Dr. Maxim Ziatdinov to the UW campus. An expert in AI/ML methods and their implementation in imaging analysis, electron microscopy workflows, and materials synthesis, Dr. Ziatdinov would lead hands-on workshops and contribute to strengthening the capabilities of the AI Core.
