September 17, 2008

NSLS Users Rack Up Numerous Awards

DOE Hydrogen R&D Award Given to Radoslav Adzic

Radoslav Adzic

Radoslav Adzic, a senior Brookhaven chemist and NSLS user, has received a 2008 DOE Hydrogen Program R&D Award, which recognizes him for his “outstanding contributions in electrocatalysis for fuel cells.” Adzic was honored in June with a plaque at a DOE ceremony held in Washington, D.C.

Adzic has been conducting studies in surface electrochemistry and electrocatalysis for a considerable part of his career using various techniques, including atomic-level surface characterization with x-rays at the NSLS beamlines. Recently, he has focused on making efficient catalysts that may be used to convert hydrogen to electricity in fuel cells for electric vehicles. For example, Adzic and his coworkers designed the first platinum monolayer fuel-cell anode electrocatalyst, which has long-term stability and the same catalytic activity as a standard, all-platinum – and pricey – electrocatalyst.

Adzic earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1974 from the University of Belgrade. He remained at the university, eventually becoming a professor and director of the Institute of Electrochemistry. In 1979, he came to Brookhaven as a visiting scientist, and, in 1992, he joined the Laboratory as a senior research associate, rising to the position of chemist in 2001, and senior chemist in 2005. Adzic won the Annual Award of Belgrade for Natural Sciences in 1983, the Medal of the Serbian Chemical Society in 1997, Brookhaven Lab’s Science and Technology Award in 2005, and the Research Award of The Electrochemical Society’s Energy Technology Division in 2007. He was elected as a correspondent member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1993, and he became a Fellow of The Electrochemical Society in 2005.

Leemor Joshua-Tor named Howard Hughes Investigator

Leemor Joshua-Tor

NSLS user and Cold Spring Harbor researcher Leemor Joshua-Tor has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. Joshua-Tor is one of 56 new HHMI Investigators selected from among 1,070 applicants. They join approximately 300 Investigators in the Institute’s flagship program, who lead Hughes laboratories at 64 institutions.

Joshua-Tor is best known for her work in revealing structures involved in the gene-silencing mechanisms of RNA interference (RNAi) – a fundamental cellular process intimately involved in the development and virus-fighting ability of all organisms, as well as gene expression. With her former student, Ji-Joon Song (now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard Medical School), Joshua-Tor used x-ray crystallography to identify the protein called the “slicer” that carries out the critical silencing event in RNAi.

Since her discovery of the slicer, Joshua-Tor has used structural biology and molecular biology tools to determine the structure of E1, a protein that is found in papillomavirus, a DNA tumor virus that causes cervical cancer. With Cold Spring Harbor researcher Eric Enemark, Joshua-Tor elucidated how E1 participates in DNA translocation.

Joshua-Tor received her Ph.D. in chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science, in Israel, and joined Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1995, where she is currently dean of the lab’s Watson School of Biological Sciences. She is the recipient of the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society and a Beckman Young Investigator Award. She performs much of her research at NSLS beamlines X29, X26C, and X25.

2008 Ludwig-Genzel-Prize Awarded to Ricardo Lobo

Ricardo Lobo

The third Ludwig-Genzel-Prize was awarded to NSLS user and National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) scientist Ricardo (Ric) Lobo. The Ludwig-Genzel-Prize, founded by Bruker Optics, is awarded biannually to a young scientist for exceptional contributions to the field of condensed-matter infrared spectroscopy. The 2008 prize was awarded to Lobo for his contributions to the optical spectroscopy of superconductors as well as for his pioneering work in the field of far infrared pump-probe spectroscopy.

Lobo’s achievements include the investigation of kinetic-energy changes across the superconducting transition in hole-doped cuprates by measuring the optical response from the far-infrared to the deep-ultraviolet regions of light. His work on the normal state gap in electron-doped cuprates also brings new insight on these controversial materials. Lobo also significantly contributed to the realization of novel pump-probe experiments at NSLS beamline U12IR by utilizing a Ti:sapphire laser synchronized to the VUV synchrotron storage ring. This allowed him to investigate the pair recombination dynamics in superconductors and gap energy shift in the photo-excited state. His most recent achievements are in the field of multiferroics, in particular the investigation of the lattice dynamics.

Lobo received his Ph.D. in physics from the Université d'Orléans in 1996. From 1997-1999, he worked at the NSLS as a University of Florida postdoctoral researcher under NSLS physicist Larry Carr, doing research on time-resolved infrared spectroscopy. He then worked as a postdoc at Ecole Normale Supérieure and then at Centre Laser Infrarouge d'Orsay in France, before joining CNRS as a staff scientist in 2003 to work at Ecole de Physique et Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris.

The 2008 Ludwig-Genzel award was presented during the Low Energy Electrodynamics in Solids (LEES) conference outside of Vancouver.

Dave Mao Elected to Royal Society of London

Dave Mao

NSLS user and Carnegie Institution of Washington researcher Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao has been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society of London, the National Academy of the United Kingdom. Mao was selected along with 44 new fellows, seven foreign members and one honorary fellow for his “extraordinary creative impact” in high-pressure science and related technology development for more than 40 years.

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.

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; winner of the 2005 Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America; and recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s Inge Lehmann Medal.

The induction to the Royal Society, which was chartered in 1662, took place in London on July 11, 2008.

2008 Ewald Prize Given to David Sayre

David Sayre

NSLS user and adjunct Stony Brook professor David Sayre won the 2008 Ewald Prize, one of the most prestigious international prizes awarded for achievements in crystallography. The prize is awarded by the International Union of Crystallography once every three years during the triennial International Congresses of Crystallography.

Sayre received the eighth Ewald Prize for "the unique breadth of his contributions to crystallography, which range from seminal contributions to the solving of the phase problem to the complex physics of imaging generic objects by x-ray diffraction and microscopy, and for never losing touch with the physical reality of the processes involved."

An adjunct professor in Stony Brook University’s Department of Physics and Astronomy since 1973, Sayre received his Ph.D. from Oxford in 1951. He works in the general field of x-ray crystallography but with a special focus on x-ray diffraction microscopy, which does not require the specimen to be a crystal and does not require the use of a lens. During the development of this technique, Sayre spent much time at the NSLS with fellow Stony Brook professors and collaborators Janos Kirz and Chris Jacobsen.

Sayre was presented with the prize during the Osaka Congress Opening Ceremony on August 23, 2008. The Ewald consists of a medal, a certificate, and an award of $30,000.

Lilach Tamam Takes Best Poster Award at Surface Scattering Conference

Lilach Tamam

NSLS user and Bar-Ilan University doctoral student Lilach Tamam received one of two best poster awards at the 10th international conference on Surface X-ray and Neutron Scattering (SXNS10). Held this year from July 1-5 at Soleil, Saint-Aubin, France, the conferences take place every two years and aim to highlight emerging scattering techniques as applied to surfaces, interfaces, and thin films of a variety of materials. Tamam’s poster, based on her work on Langmuir films of chiral molecules on liquid mercury, was selected out of 130 entries.

Tamam, a Ph.D. student in the Physics Department at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, works with collaborators at Bar-Ilan and Brookhaven to study the effects of chirality on the structure of Langmuir monolayers. Chiral molecules play an important role in the structure of living matter and in life processes, and are also ubiquitous in inroganic matter, particularly crystals. Chiral interactions are easiest to study in two dimensions, which is the reason for studying such interactions in Langmuir monolayers. At the Harvard University/BNL liquid surface spectrometer at NSLS beamline X22B, Tamam and her group study the structure of the deposited monolayers at several coverages using several surface-specific x-ray techniques: reflectivity, grazing incidence diffraction, and Bragg rods.

Tamam has received a number of academic honors including: an Excellence Scholarship from the Institute of Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, a President’s Scholarship from Bar-Ilan University; and an Excellence Scholarship from the Ministry of Science, State of Israel.