Advancements in Electron Microscopy and Beyond

Ifat Kaplan-Ashiri is an associate research staff scientist at the Department of Chemical Research Support at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. She received her PhD in chemistry from the Weizmann Institute of Science working on the mechanical properties of WS2 nanotubes. She had a postdoc in the University of Texas at Austin on simultaneous Raman and atomic force microscopy studies of single molecules and carbon nanotubes. Ifat joined the electron microscopy unit at the Weizmann Institute of Science on 2012, and she is heading the SEM team. Her main fields of interest are imaging and spectroscopy of materials, new and ancient as well as method development of spectroscopies (EDS and CL) in cryo-SEM for life science.

Oliver Plümper graduated with an MSc in Geoscience from the University of Münster, Germany prior to completing a PhD at the Center for Physics of Geological Processes, University of Oslo, Norway in 2012. Since 2013, Oliver has been an assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He became an associate professor in 2020, leading a group that addresses multi-scale earth materials research questions by coupling microscopy with natural observations, experiments, and numerical simulations. He is the (co-)PI of multiple national and international projects, among others an European Research Council Starting Grant and the EU-funded EXCITE Network (www.excite-network.eu). He is also a member of the Young Academy of Europe and, among other prizes, has received the 2020 Research Excellence medal of the European Mineralogical Union.

Daniela Nunes received her Ph.D. at Instituto Superior Técnico in 2012, in Materials Engineering and became a Post-doctoral researcher at the CENIMAT/i3N of NOVA School of Science and Technology in 2013. The post-doctoral work was entitled “Design of new functional materials for electronics applications”. She is also working at the Nanofabrication lab at CENIMAT and is responsible for the electron microscopy laboratories of CENIMAT. In 2015, she became Assistant Professor at the Materials Science Department of NOVA School of Science and Technology. She is co-author over 70 peer-reviewed papers, co-authored 1 book and 2 book chapters.

Stefan Zaefferer received his PhD in physical metallurgy and metal physics at the TU Clausthal in Germany. During his post doc time in Paris and Kyoto, he developed the computer program TOCA, an on-line TEM-Program for indexing of diffraction patterns and microscope control „virtual microscope“. He is the head of the research group Microscopy and Diffraction at the MPIE since 2000 and he has mainly dealt with the development of electron diffraction techniques in SEM and TEM and applied these methods to the investigation of various metallic and intermetallic materials. Now Stefan focuses his research on projects with emphasis on environmental protection and sustainability. He also teaches at RWTH Aachen and guest lectures at various universities.