Following some informal discussion within the UK electron microscopy community about coordinating capital investment and recurrent support for advanced EM facilities, a community meeting was held in 2009 to discuss whether there was any support for a “distributed facility” model. A report of that meeting can be found here.
One outcome of that meeting was agreement that a working group be established to develop a model or models in more detail. The formation of that working group was suspended during the bidding process and the establishment of SuperSTEM as an EPSRC Mid-Range facility. Recently, Rik Brydson and Pete Nellist have been encouraged by the EPSRC to form a working group to look at the current provision in high-performance electron microscopy, to identify where there are possible gaps and to develop possible funding models. The terms of reference for the working group can be found here.
The members of the working group were nominated by the Royal Microscopical Society, EMAG (IOP) and the SuperSTEM International Steering Panel. The members of the working group are listed below:
SuperSTEM nominated
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Prof Peter Nellist
University of Oxford
Pete Nellist is a Professor in the Department of Materials, and a Tutorial Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford. He leads a research group that focuses on the applications and development of high-resolution electron microscope techniques, in particular scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), including atomic resolution Z-contrast imaging, ptychography, electron energy-loss and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and applications of spherical aberration correctors. Pete gained his PhD from the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge. Since then he has worked in academia and in the commercial world in the UK, USA and Republic of Ireland. In 2007 he was awarded the Burton Medal by the Microscopy Society of America for exceptional contributions to microscopy, and in 2013 the Ernst Ruska Prize of the German Microscopy Society. In addition to being Vice-President of the Royal Microscopical Society he is also a Board Member of the European Microscopy Society. -
Prof Quentin Ramasse
SuperSTEM
Quentin Ramasse is the Director of the SuperSTEM Laboratory, the EPSRC UK National Facility for Aberration-Corrected STEM, and holds a visiting associate Professorship at the University of Leeds, U.K. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Cambridge as a member of the Microstructural Physics Group working on optical aberration measurements methodologies for aberration-corrected STEM. Before taking up his post at SuperSTEM he held a Staff Scientist position at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) in Berkeley, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded user facility where he took part in the TEAM project which saw development of the world's first 0.5A electron microscope. Quentin Ramasse has published extensively in the field of STEM-EELS, with a dual focus on STEM technique development and on applications to a wide range of energy harvesting materials, from 2-dimensional materials such as graphene and MoS2 nano-catalysts to complex oxides. -
Dr Jeremy Skepper
University of Cambridge
RMS nominated
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Professor Rik Brydson
RMS Honorary Secretary Physical Science
University of Leeds
Rik holds a chair in the Institute for Materials Research (IMR) in the School of Process Environmental and Materials Engineering at the University of Leeds. He heads the NanoCharacterisation group based around the Leeds Electron Microscopy and Spectroscopy (LEMAS) centre which is shared between Materials and Earth Sciences and also acts as an EPSRC facility for external UK researchers. He has a general research interest in high spatial resolution chemical analysis in nanostructured materials, and has a current research h index of 32 with over 25 years research experience in nanomaterials characterisation. He has managed extensive national and international collaborations including being current consortium leader for the UK National Facility for Aberration corrected Electron Microscopy, SuperSTEM at Daresbury.Rik is also on the Management Board of the European Microscopy Society. He has written an RMS Handbook on Electron Energy Loss Spectroscopy (Bios /Taylor and Francis 2001), has co-written a book on “Nanoscale Science and Technology" (Wiley 2005), edited a recent RMS book on Analytical Aberration-corrected Transmission Electron Microscopy with Wiley and has contributed a number of other chapters in specialist books on electron microscopy by other professional bodies covering Physics, Chemistry and Engineering. In recent years his research interests have focused on applying high spatial resolution characterisation methods (particularly TEM and EELS) to the nanochemical analysis of softer, more radiation sensitive materials.
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Prof Ed Boyes
University of York
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Prof Paul Brown
University of Nottingham
Prof Paul D Brown (PDB) is Professor of Materials Characterisation, Director of Research Equipment (Faculty of Engineering), & Co-Director of the Nanoscale & Microscale Research Centre (nmRC) at the University of Nottingham (UoN). The nmRC hosts a suite of ~ 20 high-tech analytical facilities (accessed by > 800 users), enabling a broad range of interdisciplinary materials science research programmes of interest to the engineering, physical and life sciences communities. PDB was previously member of the RMS Council (2003-2006), and the IoP EMAG committee (1999-2008) including terms as Honorary Secretary / Treasurer (2002–2004) and Chairman (2004-2006). PDB is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics and was awarded DSc by UoN in 2014. PDB’s research interests are in innovative methods in EM imaging and analysis with emphasis on interrelationships between the processing, structure and properties of materials, down to the nanoscale
EMAG nominated
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Dr Ian MacLaren
University of Glasgow
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Dr Richard Baker
University of St Andrews
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Dr Sarah Haigh
University of Manchester
Co-opted
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Emanuela Liberti
University of Oxford
Emanuela completed her PhD in Materials at Imperial College London. During her PhD, she worked on the characterisation of oxide photocatalyst nanostructures using aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM) including exit wavefunction restoration, as well as a combination of scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS).
In 2013, Emanuela joined the Department of Materials in Oxford as a Post Doctoral researcher under the ESTEEM EU fp7 program. Her research involved the development of methods for the quantification and interpretation of aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy images, using techniques such as focal and tilts series recovery of the specimen exit wave function, and imaging simulations for applications in environmental catalysis.
In 2017, Emanuela joined the electron Physical Imaging Centre (ePSIC) team as an electron microscopy scientist and Post Doctoral Research Fellow of the Oxford Materials group. Her role includes supporting users research and data analysis, as well as conducting her own research on quantitative TEM of catalytic systems and energy materials.