2013 Student and Postdoc Competition

2013 Meeting:

Graduate Student and Postdoctoral Researcher Competition

From the more than 1800 graduate students and postdoctoral researchers involved in the EFRC program, each of the 46 EFRCs was invited to nominate one graduate student and one postdoctoral researcher to present a talk at the 2013 EFRC Principal Investigators’ Meeting. The DOE EFRC management team then selected 22 finalists to present a talk at the EFRC Principal Investigators’ Meeting in Washington, D.C. on July 18 – 19, 2013. At the meeting, teams of DOE program managers selected the top three graduate students and postdoctoral researchers based on how well the research exemplified the opportunities provided by the EFRC funding modality and scientific excellence. The winners received an award certificate from Harriet Kung, Associate Director of the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences, during a ceremony at the end of the meeting.

The abstracts of all the finalist talks can be found here.

Graduate Student Winners

Preventing Helium-Induced Damage through Interface Engineering

Abishek Kashinath¹, Michael J. Demkowicz¹

¹Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Center for Materials at Irradiation and Mechanical Extremes (CMIME)

Coherent Phonon Heat Conduction in Superlattices

Maria N. Luckyanova¹; Jivtesh Garg¹; Keivan Esfarjani¹; Adam Jandl¹; Zhiting Tian¹; Bo Qiu¹; Mayank T. Bulsara¹; Aaron J. Schmidt²; Austin J. Minnich³; Shuo Chen⁴; Mildred S. Dresselhaus¹; Zhifeng Ren⁴; Eugene A. Fitzgerald¹; Gang Chen¹

¹MIT; ²Boston University; ³California Institute of Technology; ⁴University of Houston

Solid-State Solar-Thermal Energy Conversion Center (S3TEC)

Concerted Processes in Organic Photovoltaics: The Related Challenges of Generating and Collecting Charge in a Disorder Environment.

Brett M. Savoie¹; Henry Heitzer¹; Brian S. Rolczynszki¹; Bijan Movaghar¹; Stephen Loser¹; Sylvia Lou¹; Luping Yu¹,²; Lin X. Chen¹,³; Tobin J. Marks¹; Mark A. Ratner¹

¹Northwestern University; ²University of Chicago; ³Argonne National Laboratory

Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center (ANSER)

Postdoctoral Researcher Winners

Probing Light Harvesting and Photosynthetic Productivity in Cyanobacteria

Michelle Liberton¹, Lawrence Page¹*, Aaron M. Collins², William B. O’Dell³, Hugh O’Neill³, Volker S. Urban³, Jerilyn A. Timlin², and Himadri B. Pakrasi¹

¹Washington University, St. Louis; ²Sandia National Laboratories, NM; ³Oak Ridge National Laboratory; *Current address: Terra Biologics

Photosynthetic Antenna Frontier Research Center (PARC)

Adsorbate Induced Adatom Mobility in a Model Catalyst: Pd/Fe3O4

Gareth S. Parkinson¹

¹Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

Center for Atomic-Level Catalyst Design (CALCD)

Nanoscale Atoms in Solid-State Chemistry

Xavier Roy¹, Chul-Ho Lee¹, Andrew C. Crowther², Christine L. Schenck¹, Tiglet Besara³, Roger A. Lalancette⁵, Theo Siegrist³,⁴, Peter W. Stephens⁶, Louis E. Brus¹, Philip Kim¹, Michael L. Steigerwald¹, Colin Nuckolls¹

¹Columbia University; ²Barnard College; ³National High Magnetic Field Laboratory; ⁴FAMU-FSU College of Engineering; ⁵Rutgers State University; ⁶SUNY Stony Brook

Re-Defining Photovoltaic Efficiency Through Molecule Scale Control (RPEMSC)