MicroscopyPioneers
What have you found to be a really effective way to communicate the importance of science and research and to inspire young scientists and engineers? You have to draw on how things are relevant to people’s
everyday lives. For instance, people just take something like the iPhone completely for granted. If you look at the circuit diagram, it’s an incredibly complicated computer. And none of it would be possible if we didn’t know how to manufacture semiconductor circuits really well, which requires electron microscopes for visualizing the nanoscale and quality control. So, electron microscopy may look esoteric to the “real world,” but Snapchat or TikTok would not be happening without it.
In a couple of the articles about you, it was said that you’re a bit of a daredevil and you’re always up for a good adventure. How do you find the time to go on these adventures while running Nion and making technology breakthroughs? I don’t know; that came naturally. Tere’s a lot of people in
our fields, and in science in general, who do a lot of different things. And the ones who are really good at science will probably be very good at something else too. You can’t work 24 hours a day and expect to keep on getting fresh ideas. You need to take a break every now and then; it restores the mind beautifully. So, when you’re young, you try to see what kind of a peak you can climb and stuff like that, and when you get a little older, it becomes a bit more sedate, but it’s important to keep at it (Figure 3). Te Greeks invented this idea; in their academies, you were not supposed to sit around the whole
day discussing the works of Plato. You were expected to do something athletic, too. And it does help.
With all of the things that you’ve looked at in the TEM, do you have a favorite or a most exciting thing that you were able to image? Tere were several episodes where the results surpassed my
expectations, but one of them does stand above the rest. Tat was the magic evening we had at Oak Ridge, where we were imaging graphene and nanotubes. We were working with a new microscope that we delivered [to Oak Ridge] six months earlier. At the time, graphene was hard to get hold of, but I had secured a good collection of graphene and monolayer boron-nitride samples, and also some nanotubes. We brought them to Oak Ridge, and the images were just spectacular. Tey were so much clearer than anything I had seen before. And it was like, “Wow, this all really came together, the theoretical performance of the microscope has worked out in practice. Here’s the living proof.” All those years that went into designing the aberration-corrected microscope, from the proof of principle corrector, to the second- generation corrector, to the third-generation corrector with a microscope to go with it, here’s the proof that it works. I’m also very interested in biological things, but because
I’m not a biologist, I don’t know that much about them. When we ran workshops at Gatan on energy loss spectroscopy, if a biologist came along, I took them under my wing and worked with them, looking at mitochondria, endoplasmic reticulum, and all the other wonderful components of living cells that we would have no idea were out there if we didn’t have electron microscopes. Tey are truly fascinating. So, for somebody from the outside like me, it’s a new continent that seems really exciting to explore.
Any parting advice for young professionals? I don’t know if you guys had that experience where you
go to a workshop and you come out of it thinking, “Tis is a field I need to go into,” or “Tis was really fantastic.” I had that experience at the 1978 Cornell workshop organized by John Silcox and various other people. It changed the way I viewed what was important in electron microscopy and what needed to be done next. It’s so important to get people together and exchange
Figure 3: Ondrej Krivanek and Eda Lacar at Jackson Lake in Grand Teton National Park.
2021 September •
www.microscopy-today.com
ideas . . . it moves the field forward. So, do attend conferences and workshops, places where you can trade ideas. You want to listen to more than one person’s perspective, but figuring out what research path to take is something you have to decide yourself. So, stay active, go to conferences, talk to people, learn from them, and form your own opinions. And strive for that moment when you realize: “When it comes to this particular field, I probably understand it better than anybody else.” Tat’s when you’re really making progress. It’s hard work, and perspiration is a major component, but luck comes into it as well. When you get to that moment, you’ll know. Ten, 20 or 30 years later, you’ll have young people asking you to give a summary of your experiences.
59
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
