Gwanghui Ha, Xu Zhang, Sarah Wolff and Nigel Becknell have been named 2018 Enrico Fermi Fellows.
The Named Fellowship Program brings early-career researchers to Argonne who have demonstrated promise to become leaders in their fields. Fellows spearhead independent research that supports the laboratory’s mission and work closely with an Argonne sponsor to pursue their research interests.
“It is my pleasure to welcome this year’s Enrico Fermi Fellows to Argonne,” said Laboratory Director Paul Kearns. “These fellows, along with the entire Argonne community and visiting researchers, enable Argonne to make a lasting impact on society. We look forward to the advancements that these fellows will make in their fields of research.”
This year’s fellows are:
Gwanghui Ha, who will work in the Wakefield Accelerator Group of the High Energy Physics Division. His research will focus on the experimental control of the electron beam current profile based on the phase space exchange. His research will demonstrate the generation of two major current distributions using a newly introduced method called phase space exchange. This research will establish the feasibility and utility of the new method to potentially impact future accelerators.
“We are all excited to see that Gwanghui has been selected as a 2017 Enrico Fermi Fellow and are looking forward to his arrival,” said John Power (HEP). “His innovative research will add new critical capabilities to the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator Facility in the areas of phase space exchange and temporal shaping of relativistic electron beams.”
“We expect his research on temporal shaping will have far-reaching applications from advanced accelerator concepts (e.g. enhanced beam-driven Wakefield accelerators), small-footprint light sources (e.g. compact coherent accelerator based sources) and beyond (e.g. manipulation of hadron beams).”
Gwanghui Ha received his Ph.D. in physics from Pohang University of Science and Technology, South Korea. His research interest is electron beam phase space manipulation. His work has important applications to the topics of collinear Wakefield acceleration and beam diagnostics.
Xu Zhang, who will join the Nanoscience and Technology Division (NST). Zhang aims to integrate atomically thin 2D-materials-based soft electronics into soft robots to create a new paradigm of “smart soft robots” featured with “smart skin” and reconfigurable/programmable bodies.
“Xu’s vision of developing soft machines will have a tremendous impact among a variety of fields in fundamental and applied science. By leveraging the unique properties of 2D materials, these machines will have reconfigurable bodies enabling them to sense and adapt to the environment while harvesting energy from it,” said Daniel Lopez (NST). “The project is well aligned with Department of Energy goals and moves Argonne toward a leadership role in scalable materials synthesis and integration of materials into devices.”
Zhang is currently working as a postdoctoral associate in the Microsystems Technologies Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He obtained his Ph.D. and M.S. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. He received his B.S. degree in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China.
Sarah Wolff, who will work in the Energy Systems Division. Her studies focus on the underlying physics of laser-material interactions in both subtractive and additive processes and their influence on resulting microstructure and mechanical behavior.
Wolff plans to address the overarching challenge of characterizing unique phase transformations of additively manufactured molten metallic alloys with in-situ X-ray imaging and diffraction to understand and control for the underlying physical phenomena driving such rapid and directional solidification.
Wolff is a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. She holds a B.S. degree in environmental engineering from Northwestern.
Nigel Becknell works in the Energy Conversion and Storage group in the Materials Science Division. His fellowship research will center on designing hollow macrostructures built from nanocrystal building blocks for applications at electrochemical interfaces. He has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.
“Nigel will further advance utilization of fundamental properties of materials through high precision synthesis of materials for energy storage and conversion at the level that hasn’t been achieved at Argonne or elsewhere. His approach has potential to create a new generation of real-world materials with additional options for the fine tuning of their functional properties,” said Vojislav Stamenkovic (MSD).