April 24, 2008

NSLS Users Earn Prestigious Honors

Jingguang Chen Receives 2008 Award for Excellence in Catalysis

Jingguang Chen

University of Delaware professor Jingguang Chen – co-founder and a principal investigator of the Synchrotron Catalysis Consortium at the NSLS – won the 2008 Award for Excellence in Catalysis from the Catalysis Society of Metropolitan New York. He is being recognized “for his work in understanding the physical and chemical properties of bimetallic and metal carbide surfaces, which has inspired new applications of fundamental studies to catalytic and fuel cell processes.”

Chen will receive a plaque and a cash gift at the society’s award ceremony on May 21 in Somerset, N.J., where he will also present an Excellence in Catalysis Award lecture.

Using combined experimental and theoretical approaches – many at the NSLS – Chen’s group has made pioneering contributions in the understanding and design of bimetallic and carbide catalysts with properties desirable for fuel cell development. His group has also advanced the use of near-edge x-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) studies to elucidate the chemical and physical properties of catalysts and of key reactive species on them. His 1997 monograph on NEXAFS investigations of metal oxides, nitrides, carbides, and sulfides, published in Surface Science Reports, remains the seminal study in this area. Currently, Chen is involved in a $4.6 million research project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to make hydrogen fuel cells less costly and more stable through the use of materials such as tungsten carbide modified with low concentrations of platinum instead of pure platinum.

Chen received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh. After a year in Germany as a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow, he began his career in industry in 1989 at the Exxon Research and Engineering Co. in Annandale, N.J. He joined the University of Delaware in 1998 and served as director of the Center for Catalytic Science and Technology from 2002 through 2007.

Linda Hirst Earns NSF Early-Career Award

Linda Hirst

Linda Hirst, an NSLS user and Florida State University researcher, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development grant for using synchrotron light to explore biological processes involving cell membranes. Hirst’s research project, titled “Self-Assembly of Polyunsaturated Lipids and Cholesterol in the Cell Membrane,” will receive about $573,000 in funding over five years. The NSF offers the awards “in support of the early career-development activities of those teacher-scholars who most effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their organization.”

Hirst’s research interests focus on soft condensed matter studies, in particular, those concerning biophysics and liquid crystal materials. In her lab at Florida State and at NSLS beamline X6B, Hirst and a team of undergraduate and graduate students are investigating how the arrangements of lipids and cholesterol result in changes in cell membrane structure. The team uses x-ray diffraction techniques to study the arrangements of biological molecules at atomic length scales, combined with microscopy to study the same biological materials on a cellular level.

Hirst received her Ph.D. in experimental physics in 2001 from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, where she studied smectic liquid crystal materials. In 2004, she was awarded the Glenn H. Brown prize by the International Liquid Crystal Society for her doctoral research. After a post-doctoral position at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she joined Florida State’s Center for Materials Research and Technology in 2005. She is also associated with the university’s Institute of Molecular Biophysics.

Dave Mao Awarded American Geophysical Union Medal

Dave Mao

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has awarded NSLS user and Carnegie Institution of Washington researcher Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao the Inge Lehmann Medal for “outstanding contributions to the understanding of the structure, composition, and dynamics of the Earth’s mantle and core.” Mao has been a pioneer in high-pressures physics and related technology development for more than 30 years.

The Lehmann Medal, named in honor of Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann and her many contributions to the understanding the Earth’s mantle and core, is given every other year. Mao was awarded on December 12, 2007 at the fall AGU meeting in San Francisco.

Mao is a world leader in ultrahigh pressure research and technology development and in applying that technology to physics, materials science, geophysics, chemistry, geochemistry, and the planetary sciences. He and colleagues first reached 1 megabar static pressure in 1976, which doubled the previous pressure limit. Since then, his group has consistently improved the multimegabar technique and coupled it with analytical methods, including synchrotron x-ray diffraction, infrared, Raman, Brillouin, fluorescence, and Mossbauer spectroscopies. At NSLS beamlines X17C, X17B, and U2A, Mao built dedicated high-pressure diamond-anvil cell (DAC) facilities that have been imitated by major synchrotrons around the world. Mao uses the NSLS DAC facilities to determine mineral physical properties of the Earth’s major constituents under deep mantle and core conditions, including phase transitions, melting, elasticity, and rheology of iron, silicates and oxides. These studies are essential components of his contributions that led to the Lehman Medal.

Mao received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1968 and became a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory. He is a co-recipient of the 2005 Balzan Prize from the Balzan Foundation for mineral physics; the recipient of the 2005 Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science for crystallography; and the 2005 Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America.

Technical Achievement Award Given to José Rodriguez

José Rodriguez

José Rodriguez, a senior Brookhaven chemist and NSLS user, received an Outstanding Technical Achievement Award from HENAAC, a nonprofit organization that honors the outstanding contributions of Hispanic American professionals in science, engineering, technology and mathematics. Rodriguez was honored at the HENAAC Awards Show in San Diego on October 12, 2007.

During his 16-year career at Brookhaven Lab, Rodriguez’s primary research focus has been on catalysts used for the production of clean, efficient, renewable fuels and for the control of environmental pollution. At the NSLS, for example, Rodriguez and his research team recently studied gold deposited on ceria (cerium-oxide) nanoparticles and found the catalyst’s active phase responsible for the conversion of water and carbon monoxide to hydrogen gas and carbon dioxide. Understanding this “water-gas shift” reaction is important for generating hydrogen, which can be used for chemical transformations as well as a fuel in a hydrogen-based economy.

In new research funded by the Office of Basic Energy Sciences within the DOE Office of Science, Rodriguez and researchers from the NSLS and Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) will combine their efforts with university researchers to better understand and improve the performance of nanocatalysts.

Rodriguez earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry from Indiana University in 1988, and after postdoctoral studies in chemistry at Texas A&M University, he joined Brookhaven as a research associate in 1991. Rodriguez serves on the editorial board of the journal Surface Science and as guest editor for the Journal of Molecular Catalysis. Since 2005, Rodriguez has been an adjunct professor of chemistry at Stony Brook University.

ARTICLE BY: Kendra Snyder