Lynda Soderholm, Chris Jacobsen, John Mitchell, Robert Wiringa and Michael Wang have been named Argonne Distinguished Fellows.
Argonne Distinguished Fellows represent only three percent of research staff at the facility, making the award the highest scientific and engineering rank at the laboratory. The new fellows are recognized internationally for their work and show the type of leadership that impacts Argonne’s future and its mission.
Lynda Soderholm
Lynda Soderholm is a senior chemist and group leader in the Chemical Sciences and Engineering Division. Soderholm is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the American Chemical Society.
Soderholm works to understand the influence of the actinide and lanthanide elements on the physical and chemical properties of materials. Soderholm received the University of Chicago’s Board of Governors Distinguished Performance Award in 2009.
Soderholm started working at Argonne in 1985 as a postdoctoral appointee and moved up the ranks until she became a senior chemist in 2001.
Chris Jacobsen
Chris Jacobsen is a special advisor to the director of the Advanced Photon Source for imaging and instrumentation, as well as a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy (and member of the Applied Physics program and the Chemistry of Life Processes Institute) at Northwestern University.
Jacobsen’s research focuses on developing new optics and computation methods in X-ray microscopy and applying them to problems in biology, environmental science and materials science.
He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America as well as the recipient of awards including a Presidential Faculty Fellowship and the Kurt Heinrich and International Dennis Gabor awards.
His PhD students have won Werner Meyer-Ilse (International X-ray Microscopy), Julian Baumert (Brookhaven Lab), Gertrude Scharf-Goldhaber (Brookhaven Lab), and Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation (Stony Brook University) awards.
Jacobsen has been a user of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne since 2002, and moved to Argonne and Northwestern in 2010.
John Mitchell
John Mitchell is a senior chemist and associate director of the Materials Science Division. Mitchell is a leader of the Emerging Materials group, a fellow of the American Physical Society and an adjunct professor in the Materials Science and Engineering Department of the University of California Santa Barbara.
Mitchell’s research emphasizes strategic synthesis, crystal growth, and structural studies of transition metal oxides and chalcogenides using neutron and X-ray scattering. Mitchell was awarded the DOE Early Career Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 1999 and 2000.
Mitchell became a DOE Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne’s Material Science Division in 1993, and was appointed to the staff in 1996.
Robert Wiringa
Robert Wiringa is a senior physicist in the Physics Division and a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Wiringa is interested in nucleon-nucleon and three-nucleon interactions, quantum Monte Carlo calculations of nuclear structure and reactions, and variational studies of dense nucleon matter and neutron stars.
Wiringa joined Argonne’s Physics Division in 1981. He shared the University of Chicago Medal for Distinguished Performance at Argonne in 2000, and the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics for his work in computational physics in 2010 with partner Steven Pieper, also of the Physics Division.
Michael Wang
Michael Wang is a senior scientist and the manager of the Systems Assessment Group of the Energy Systems Division, an associate editor for the Biotechnology for Biofuels and a member of the Transportation Energy Committee of the Transportation Research Board and the Society of Automotive Engineers.
In his research, Wang assesses the impact of vehicle technologies and fuels. His life cycle analysis results have been used worldwide in evaluating energy and environmental effects of vehicle technologies and energy systems. He studies transportation development in emerging economies such as China.
Wang began to work at Argonne in 1991, and became a senior scientist in 2008.