University of California, Los Angeles (United States)

Biography

Jianwei (John) Miao is professor of physics and astronomy at the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. He is an internationally renowned pioneer in the development of novel imaging methods with X-rays and electrons. He performed the seminal experiment of extending X-ray crystallography to allow structural determination of non-crystalline specimens in 1999, which is known as coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), a form of lensless or computational microscopy. CDI methods, such as plane-wave CDI, ptychography (i.e., scanning CDI), and Bragg CDI, have been implemented in a wide range of applications in the physical and biological sciences using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free-electron lasers, high harmonic generation, and optical and electron microscopy. In 2012, he applied CDI algorithms to pioneer atomic electron tomography (AET) to determine the 3D structure of materials without assuming crystallinity. He has performed several ground-breaking AET experiments to determine the 3D structure of crystal defects at the single-atom level. In 2019, he developed 4D AET to observe crystal nucleation at atomic resolutions, showing that a theory beyond classical nucleation theory is needed to describe nucleation at the atomic scale. More recently, he advanced AET to solve a long-standing grand challenge in the physical sciences: determining the 3D atomic structure of amorphous solids for the first time.  

Miao is the deputy director of the STROBE NSF Science and Technology Center and the associate editor of Science Advances and Crystallography Reviews. His honours and awards include: the Werner Meyer-Ilse Memorial Award (1999), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2006-2008), Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award in Physics and Astronomy at UCLA (2006-2007), Kavli Frontiers Fellowship (2010), Theodore von Kármán Fellowship from the RWTH Aachen University (2013), Microscopy Today Innovation Award (2013), University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2015-2017), Fellow of American Physical Society (2016), NSF Creativity Award (2018), and the Innovation in Materials Characterization Award from the Materials Research Society (2021).  

John Miao
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Oct 13

Schawlow-Townes Symposium on Photonics 2022

Sylvain Charbonneau, Vice-President, Research and Innovation at the University of Ottawa, and Geneviève Tanguay, Vice-President, Emerging Technologies…