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MicroscopyPioneers


You made the switch from academia to industry research. How difficult was that switch? For me, it wasn’t that much of a switch. I always found


Figure 1: (left to right) Niklas Dellby (co-founder of Nion), Chris Meyer (an old friend who joined Nion in 2012 and heads the software effort), and Ondrej Krivanek in front of the very first corrector they built at Cambridge UK, circa 1995.


brand-new areas where there’s going to be a lot of interesting research to be done, where you young folks can really make a contribution and stake out a career. Start with a [research] hunch, just an expectation, and follow that. If it seems to be turning out well, keep following it!


that doing good research wasn’t about where you were doing it; it was about what you were doing. Te benefit of working in industry is that finding funding can actually be easier. We had a magical 10 years at Gatan where Peter Swann, the president of the company, was very open-minded. While he would watch the bottom line, I could come to him and say, “Tis idea should be looked into, and it probably will make money,” and he would say “OK, go for it.” Te benefit of working in academia is that the research payoff—the output—doesn’t have to be achieved within the next few years, which is important for riskier projects, like aberration correction. Aberration correction would not have made any sense for me to do while I was in industry, at Gatan; it was too speculative. So, the smart thing to do was to first take a leave of absence and go explore the concept in academia, which was what I did! But then, in academia, it would have been very difficult to get funding for round 2 of the project: improving the corrector so it would work better and be easier to operate. If I had written that proposal in academia, it would have been rejected. What’s the point? We had already done it and were just trying to improve it. However, in industry, at a small company like Nion, we were able to get the funding to continue corrector development and improve the instrument.


What was it like transitioning from research scientist to entrepreneur and really starting your own company? I think that every university professor is actually an


Figure 2: Some of Dr. Krivanek’s work, featured on the March 25, 2010 cover of Nature.


58 doi:10.1017/S1551929521001115


entrepreneur! He/she/they run a group of postdocs and research students. Funding is needed, projects are needed, facilities are needed, budgets are considered, and proposals are written. You can’t do that without a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. So, when I switched to operating a start-up company, basically I ran it as a university research group, and it worked well. However, as an entrepreneur, instead of writing proposals, you write quotes; people come to you saying that they want things. Sometimes they want things that are not working yet, and those become customer-industry joint development projects. An example is our monochromator, which we wrote a theoretical paper about, describing how the monochromator should be designed. Ray Carpenter at Arizona State University read the paper and said, “Tat’s the monochromator I want,” but apart from the theoretical design, the thing didn’t exist yet. He came to us and said, “I have money for one. Can you make it for me?” And we said, “OK, great. But, you know, it’s probably going to take us about three years because we haven’t yet started on the detailed design.” We went ahead, and it turned out to be the highest-performing monochromator that anybody’s ever made.


www.microscopy-today.com • 2021 September


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