iCFN: Message from CFN Director Emilio Mendez

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I was thrilled to see so many young, enthusiastic faces visiting CFN over the summer months, from families touring our facilities to very bright student interns. I hope you are all feeling as refreshed and ready for fall as I am.

Working with our network of users and staff scientists, the CFN management team has developed a strategic plan to chart our course for the next five years. This plan helps guarantee CFN’s continued leadership in nanoscience, clarifies our research priorities, and pledges to keep improving the experience of our users. 

The needs of the CFN community helped guide each element of the plan, which will impact all of us. Town-hall meetings with the Users’ Executive Committee were especially valuable, and I thank the UEC for their thoughtful participation and unflagging dedication. 

The Science Advisory Committee—composed of leading scientists from institutions outside of Brookhaven—reviewed an early draft of the strategic plan and offered very positive, constructive feedback. I am confident that we have developed a five-year map that will serve all members of the CFN community and honor our dual mission: enabling external users to carry out advanced nanoscience projects and conducting research to discover, understand, and exploit energy-related nanomaterials.

The strategic plan will be available soon on the CFN website; in the meantime, I would like to share the larger points with you. The plan revolves around three principal themes: nanomaterials in operando conditions, nano-architectures for energy solutions, and self-assembled nanomaterials by design. These large research areas represent our signature strengths at CFN and where we will continue to invest and excel.

CFN will soon be the world-leader of in operando research, bolstered by the unprecedented brightness of NSLS-II and our own suite of in-house techniques: aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning probe microscopy, and x-ray photoemission spectroscopy techniques. Crucially, we can conduct reaction studies at high temperature and even above atmospheric pressure. Our in operando experiments will be complemented by our computational theory group, who will work with users to map and understand reactions in custom-tailored new materials.

A focus on novel nano-architectures will advance cutting-edge energy technologies, including photovoltaics and energy storage devices. We are at the forefront of devising new methods that preserve exotic nanoscale phenomena on much larger scales. New synthesis and patterning methods will allow users to create and characterize multi-component nanostructures and optimize their macroscale performance.

With self-assembled nanomaterials, we will discover and harness the principles underlying by-design self-organization and fabrication of functional hybrid organic-inorganic structures. CFN scientists already have recognized expertise in using soft matter molecules such as DNA and polymers to create materials with prescribed and fully tunable organizations, compositions, and functional characteristics, and we will push that work forward with a new generation of in situ characterization techniques.

We will, of course, continue to seek out leading researchers from academia and industry to join CFN as users. As just one quick example, you can find an interview with MIT physicist Dirk Englund in this issue of iCFN that explores what draws him to CFN.

The strategic plan also recognizes the chief assets of CFN that will help us break new ground in those three research areas: engaged users, expert staff, excellent operations and safety, state-of-the-art facilities, and the NSLS-II synergy. Each of these will be expanded and celebrated over the coming years.

Beyond the science mission, we have an ongoing responsibility to share our science with the larger community. I want to thank many of you for participating in our outreach efforts this summer, especially as hosts to more than 750 visitors who joined us for the CFN Summer Sunday. It was a great success, and I was happy to see so many families and young children in attendance.

I gave a brief talk several times that day—answering the question “Why nano?”—and one especially curious student from Suffolk County Community College expressed his renewed interest in a career as a scientist. We should never take for granted our ability to inspire others and celebrate the wonder of nano. I hope you will all share stories with your friends, neighbors, and anyone else who may not recognize the value of nanoscience.

Finally, I want to welcome Stony Brook University’s Balaji Raghothamachar as our new UEC Chair—please take the time to read his message in this issue. We also have our usual 10 questions feature with Deyu Lu of our Computation and Theory Group, which may elucidate new collaborative opportunities for some of you.

Have a safe, productive, and stimulating fall! I look forward to learning about your research and CFN community outreach beyond the lab.

— Emilio Mendez
Director, Center for Functional Nanomaterials

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