Advanced Electron Microscopy and Instrumentation

Dr. Cai received his Ph.D. in Material Science and Electron Microscopy from Nanjing University in 2019. From 2019 to 2020, he was serving as a postdoctoral fellow in the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. After that, he joined the Department of Applied Physics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in Oct. 2020 as a Research Assistant Professor, and he was promoted to Assistant Professor in Oct. 2022. His research interests include the development and application of in situ electron microscopy techniques, and the advanced scanning transmission electron microscopy characterizations of functional perovskite materials and devices. His research works have been published in renowned journals including Nature, Nature Electronics, Nature Communications, J. Am. Chem. Soc., ACS Energy Lett., Adv. Funct. Mater. etc.

See Wee Chee is currently the group leader for liquid phase electron microscopy in the Department of Interface Science at the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI) of the Max Planck Society. Since graduating with a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, See Wee has worked extensively on using electron microscopy to visualize dynamic processes in liquids and gases. He previously worked in universities in the United States (Arizona State University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) and Singapore (National University of Singapore) before taking up his current position in Germany. His group at the FHI focuses on capturing and understanding the transformations that take place in electrocatalysts under applied potential and in the electrolyte with liquid phase electron microscopy and other complementary techniques.

Professor Fu-Rong Chen received his bachelor's degree in Materials Science and Engineering at National Tsing Hua University in Shinchu in 1980. He obtained his Ph.D. in Materials Science from Stony Brook University, USA in 1986 and started his postdoctoral career as research associate at MIT from 1986 to 1988. From 1988 to 1990, he worked as research assistant professor at Northwestern University, USA.

1990, Prof. Chen Furong joined National Tsinghua University and was promoted to the position of Chair Professor in 2017.

2018, Prof. Chen joined City University of Hong Kong as Chair Professor and served as Director of City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Futian Research Institute.

Prof. Chen has long been engaged in the research field of materials science and electron microscopes. His research interests are in low-dose 3D atomic resolution dynamics, soft materials dynamics imaging, quantum electron microscopy, and solar energy tunable (SET) glass.

During his research career, Prof. Chen published more than 300 SCI papers in high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, PNAS, etc. and he received many awards and honors, including The best paper in the year in Europea Microscopy Society 2012, The Microscopy Society of American Innovation Award for the Design of an Ultrafast/ Ultra High Voltage Desktop Electron Microscope in 2019 and The Distinguished Professor of Tsing Hua University in 2012. He received an average of 5 invited talks for international conferences per year.

In the field of industrialization of scientific achievements, he has founded two high-tech companies, engaged in the research and development of electrochromic energy-saving smart glass and compact electron microscope.

Rafal Dunin-Borkowski is Director of the Institute for Microstructure Research and the Ernst Ruska-Centre for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons in Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany and Professor of Experimental Physics in RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His Ph.D. (1990-1994) was carried out in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy in the University of Cambridge. After working as a postdoctoral research scientist in the University of Cambridge, Arizona State University and Oxford University, between 2000 and 2006 he held a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in the University of Cambridge. Between 2007 and 2010, he led the establishment of the Center for Electron Nanoscopy in the Technical University of Denmark. He specializes in the characterization of magnetic and electronic materials at the highest spatial resolution using advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques, including aberration-corrected high-resolution transmission electron microscopy and off-axis electron holography. He has published more than 920 journal papers, conference papers and book chapters, has given more than 360 invited lectures and seminars, has been a member of 40 advisory boards and steering committees, has organized 45 conference symposia and workshops and has received 20 prizes for papers presented at conferences and 6 prizes for science as art.

Xuewen Fu is currently a professor of condensed matter physics in School of Physics at Nankai University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from at Peking University in 2014 and joined in Prof. Ahmed Zewail (Nobel laureate) group in California Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral fellow to work on ultrafast electron microscopy (UEM), where he developed the first liquid-phase UEM, extending the dynamical studies with UEM to liquids. In June 2017, he joined in Brookhaven National Laboratory as a Research Associate and developed the first laser-free UEM with Prof. Yimei Zhu in 2019. In November 2019, he joined in Nankai University as a professor and built up the Nankai University Ultrafast Electron Microscopy Laboratory in 2020. Prof. Fu has published more than 60 journal papers, including one Science, three Science Advances, one Nature Communications, one Advanced Materials, and six ACS Nano etc. Prof. Fu’s research interest mainly focuses on the field of developing advanced in situ four-dimensional UEM and ultrafast optical spectroscopy technologies with high spatiotemporal resolution to study the transient structural, energy carrier and spin dynamics in low dimensional functional materials.

Vincenzo Grillo is the head of the electron microscopy group and Research Director at CNR. He graduated in physics from the University of Genova (110/110 cum laude).

He received his PhD in electron microscopy at the University of Parma, while performing collaborative work with Erlangen university (Germany). In 2001 he was a visiting scientist at the Tokyo Institute of Technology working on cathodoluminescence in TEM. Since 2003 he has been working at INFM (from 2006 merged in CNR) as a scientist in electron microscopy. He has developed innovative TEM-STEM methodology and published the first quantitative use of STEM with HAADF detector for chemical analyses. To this aim he developed the first parallel computing implementation of STEM simulations.

He is now working on beam shaping and innovative electron optics. He and his group are now among the world’s leading groups in this sector for their work on MEMS based optics, phase holograms, vortex beams, spin-orbit coupling in a TEM and Light-Electron interaction based beam shaping. In 2015 he was a visiting researcher at the University of Oregon. In 2016 he received the Humboldt Foundation’s BESSEL research award for his work on Beam shaping. In 2022 he received the Ernst Ruska Prize, one of the most important international recognition in electron microscopy.

Dr. Grillo is co-author of at least 150 articles and 5 book chapters and was invited or plenary speaker in at least 30 conferences. He has coordinated or acted as a WP leader in 3 EU projects of microscopy and advisor for a few important laboratories. The H-factor of his publications is 43.

Benedikt Haas started his career in electron microscopy during his master project (physics) at Philipps-Universität in Marburg (Germany) in 2010/11, where he investigated organic semiconductors in the group of Kerstin Volz. He defended his PhD on method development for imaging and diffraction based quantitative STEM at the CEA Grenoble (France) under the supervision of Jean-Luc Rouvière in 2017. Afterwards, he did a postdoc in the group of Christoph Koch at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany) until 2020 where he has been a staff scientist in charge of the Nion HERMES microscope since, working on 4D-STEM as well as high-resolution EELS. Since 2023 he is PI of a project on "Pumping, Measuring and Modeling Atomic Vibrations in the Electron Microscope".

Maximilian Haider studied physics in Kiel and Darmstadt and received his PhD in 1987 in Darmstadt with an experimental work which was carried out at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). In 1989 he became a Group Leader within the Physical Instrumentation Program at the EMBL. In 1992 he started a project to set up a Cs-corrector for a 200 kV TEM together with Prof. Rose in Darmstadt and Prof. Urban in Juelich. In 1996 he founded CEOS GmbH in Heidelberg together with Joachim Zach.

Researches include:

1. Developing atomic-resolved in situ microscopy techniques and methods;
2. X-ray detection and photon/electron detection materials and techniques;
3. Build materials structure-property relationships;
4. Atomistic mechanisms of dislocations and grain/twin boundaries;
5. Developing high strength yet ductile metals and alloys.

Publishing more than 270 scientific papers including Science, Nature, Nature series journals, Phys. Rev. Letts., Adv. Mater., Acta Mater., etc. Awarded National Nature Science Prize (2nd-Class, 2021), First-Class Prize of Beijing Science and Technology Progress.

Dr.Shih-Wei Hung received his PhD degree from National Tsing Hua University in 2012. He then worked as a postdoc at Tokyo University, Japan in 2014 before joining City University of Hong Kong in 2018.

He conducts research on methodology development of three-dimensional atomic resolution dynamics reconstruction for the soft materials imaging with aberration corrected environmental transmission electron microscope. In addition to electron microscopy, he also investigated material properties at atomic scale, such as biomolecule adsorption, wettability, and thermal boundary conductivity, using molecular dynamics simulations.

Dr. Yu-Chun Hsueh received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2018.

His recent research interests focus on the development and manufacturing of ultrafast and quantum technology with scanning and transmission electron microscopes. He also has many years of experience in laser optical design, optical measurement system, optical and THz waveguide design, optical force theory and aperiodic nanostructures design.

Wolfgang Jaeger received his Diploma and his Doctor degree (Dr rer nat, 1976) in Physics from the University of Stuttgart based on his research work at the Max-Planck-Institute for Metal Research, Stuttgart, Germany under the guidance of Professor Alfred Seeger. He joined the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory USA (1977-1979) as a post-doc scientist. From 1979 to 1996 he took positions of a staff scientist and of a group leader of a microstructure research group at the Institute for Solid State Research at the Research Centre Juelich, Germany. In 1996, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Microanalysis of Materials Group at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel / Kiel University, Germany. He contributed to establishing the infrastructure and the study course system in Materials Science and initiated and coordinated several interdisciplinary activities at the Kiel University.

In 2013, he retired from his university teaching duties and since continues with research and further professional activities, such as co-organizing scientific conferences and workshops on advanced transmission electron microscopy and its applications to current topics in materials and life science. Currently, he enjoys being guest scientist at the Ernst Ruska - Center of the Forschungszentrum Juelich, Germany, and at the Department of Physics of the Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg Sweden.

His research interest focuses on transmission electron microscopy and microstructure research in materials science of functional thin films, nanomaterials and materials for energy. He published more than 300 scientific publications, including book chapters and review articles, and has given numerous invited and plenary presentations at international conferences, in advanced scientific schools, and in institutes.

Ute Kaiser received her Diploma (1976) and her PhD in Crystallography (1993) from the Humboldt University Berlin, her Habilitation in Experimental Physics from the Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany, in 2002. From 2004 till 30th of September 2023 she was full professor at Ulm University in the Physics Department and Head of Ulm’s Materials Science Electron Microscopy Centre. Starting from 1st of October she is senior professor at Ulm University at the Institute for Quantum Optics.

Professor Angus Kirkland was awarded his MA and PhD from the University of Cambridge and has held the posts of Professor of Materials at Oxford since 2005 and JEOL Professor of Electron Microscopy since 2013. In 2016 he was appointed as Director of the National Physical Sciences Imaging Centre at Diamond Lightsource and is Science Director at the recently established Rosalind Franklin Institute.

He was awarded the MSA prize in 2005, the Rose prize in 2015, the Quadrennial prize of the European Microscopy Society in 2016 and the Agar Medal for Electron Microscopy in 2017.

He served as General Secretary of the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy in from 2014 -2018 and was elected President in 2018.

He has also served as Editor in Chief of Ultramicroscopy since 2010.

Dr. Christian Kisielowski was Principle Investigator and Staff Scientist at the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, CA. He was awarded his PhD in natural sciences (physics, mathematics, chemistry) and his Habilitation in experimental physics at the University of Cologne / Germany in 1985 and 1990, respectively, for performing spectroscopic studies of defects in semiconductors. Thereafter, he joint AT&T Bell Laboratories (1991 – 1994) where he invented new quantitative tools for image analyses in High Resolution Electron Microscopy. Since 1997, Dr. Kisielowski serves as Staff Scientist at the NCEM where he developed and applied atomic resolution electron microscopy, sample preparation, and computational tools. He was the first to demonstrate sub-Ångstrom resolution in 1999 by mid-voltage phase contrast microscopy and reached record resolution below 0.5 Å, which touches the physical limits of obtainable resolution and was established in 2009 within the TEAM Project (Transmission Electron Aberration-corrected Microscopy).

Recognizing that beam-sample interactions and time resolution are most challenging aspects of atomic resolution electron microscopy, he developed a low dose rate technique, which enables time-resolved investigations of functionality on a single atom level in three dimensions and environmental meaningful conditions (elevated p, T). Instrumentation providing spatiotemporal resolution of 1 Å and 1 ps is within reach. Such capabilities touch quantum mechanical limits and are of significant interest in the context heterogeneous systems for sustainable energy research that commonly contain soft and hard matter components including single-digit nanoparticles, two-dimensional materials, interfaces, surfaces or point and extended defects. Dr. Kisielowski has published over 200 peer reviewed articles including multiple publications in respected journals such as Science, Nature Materials, Nano Letters, Angewandte Chemie, Phys. Rev. Lett., and others. His h-index is 60 and he retired from the LBNL in 2022 to consult at different institutions.

Pieter Kruit is emeritus professor of physics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He has had a chair in charged particle optics from 1989 until November 2022.

His research has always been related to the development of electron- and ion-optical instruments, “trying to improve our eyes to look at the microscopic world and the hands that we use to create a new nano-world”. He has had research programs on nm-resolution electron spectroscopy, developments of low energy-spread electron- and ion sources and multi-beam optics for microscopy and lithography. Most of his work was performed in cooperation with industry. For his work in electron lithography he founded, with two of his graduates, MAPPER Lithography. His involvement in trying to reduce magnetic disturbances from a planned tramway through the university has led to a novel current supply system implemented in tramlines in Lund and Utrecht. Based on his ideas on combining electron microscopy with light microscopy, he started. with some of his co-workers and students, the company DELMIC. Among his organizational responsibilities was the presidency of the Dutch Society for Microscopy, the editorship of Ultramicroscopy and the directorship of the Delft physics education. In acknowledgement for his contributions he received the national physics “Valorization award” and the University’s yearly teaching award. In 2012 he was knighted in the order of the Dutch Lion. In September 2021, he started a new career as Chief Technology Officer of the electron column department of Applied Materials.

Dr. Tao Ni is an Assistant Professor in the School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Hong Kong from 2022. Prior to joining to HKU, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford and visitor scientist at eBIC working on HIV capsid and carboxysomes using cryoEM and cryoET subtomogram averaging. He completed his Bachelor in Biological Sciences degree in Nankai University (2008-2012) and PhD in structural biology in the University of Oxford (2012-2016). His research focuses on the interface between host and pathogens to decipher their relationship in the molecular level using cryo-electron tomography.

Hiroshi Okamoto received a Dr. Sci. degree in experimental low temperature physics from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 1995. Since then, he has worked at universities and national/private research institutes in Japan, North America, and Europe. He is currently a Professor at Akita Prefectural University, Akita, Japan. His research interests include quantum electron microscopy and renewable energy storage.

Philipp Pelz received Bachelor degrees in Physics (2011) and Informatics (2012), and Master degrees in Applied & Engineering Physics, Materials Science & Chemistry (2013). In 2018 he obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Hamburg & The Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter, Germany. Subsequently, he spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley and the National Center for Electron Microscopy. Since August 2022 he is Tenure-Track Professor for Computational Materials Microscopy at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Prof. Dr. Sascha Schäfer holds a chair in Experimental Physics at the University of Regensburg/Germany. His research group “Ultrafast Nanoscale Dynamics” focusses on the development of novel ultrafast transmission electron microscopy (UTEM) instrumentation and time-resolved electron imaging approaches with applications in the probing of local structural and spin dynamics and free-electron/light interactions.

Prof. Schäfer received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry at the Univ. of Darmstadt and worked as a PostDoc from 2009 – 2012 together with A. H. Zewail at Caltech. In 2012, he joined the group of C. Ropers at the Univ. of Göttingen as the sub-group leader of the UTEM team. During this time, the Göttingen UTEM team pioneered the development of highly coherent laser-driven electron sources from Schottky emitters and demonstrated quantum coherent electron-light interaction in optical near-fields. At the University of Oldenburg, he established his own research group in 2017 funded by a Lichtenberg professorship of the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2023, his research group relocated to the University of Regensburg joining the Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy (RUN).

Xihang Shi obtained his Bachelor's degree from Sun Yat-Sen University in China, and PhD from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Currently, he is engaged in postdoctoral research at Technion, Israel.

Roy specializes in an interdisciplinary applied physics field involving accelerator physics, quantum physics, nanophotonics, electron optics and electron microscopy, and ultrafast lasers. In transmission electron microscopy, he pioneered the field of computer-generated holograms in electron optics using amplitude and phase masks etched into thin silicon-nitride membranes, and authored a series of 6 influential publications along with 2 granted patents. His expertise further encompasses the design of novel nanophotonic structures for electron acceleration, based on traditional and adapted accelerator physics concepts. His efforts on "dielectric laser accelerators" culminated in two Nature publications in the past three years. He also designed a high-resolution, photon-order resolving magnetic spectrometer suited for use in a standard scanning electron microscope, which enabled measuring photon-energy differences in an electron-photon quantum interaction – for the first time in a scanning electron microscope, as reported on in an Editor-selected and Physics-featured Physical Review Letter.

Murat Sivis is a senior researcher and project leader at the University of Göttingen and the Max-Planck Institute for multidisciplinary sciences in Göttingen. He received his undergraduate education in physics at the University of Göttingen and earned a PhD in Physics in 2013 under the supervision of Prof. Claus Ropers. In 2016 he was a visiting researcher at the National Research Council Ottawa in the group of Prof. Paul Corkum.

He is part of the Göttingen Ultrafast Transmission Electron Microscopy (Gö-UTEM) project, where he studies electron-light interactions.

Dr. Sivis authored one book chapter and 23 journal articles. He received the Dr. Berliner-Dr. Ungewitter PhD thesis prize (2014) and the award for outstanding scientific publications by an early career scientist (2014) of the University of Göttingen and the Lower Saxony science prize (2019).

Dr. Petra Specht is an Associate Scientist at the MSE Department of UC Berkeley. In 1996 she was awarded her PhD in Natural Sciences (Dr.rer.nat.) from the Technical University in Aachen, Germany while working at the Max-Planck Institute for Iron Research in Duesseldorf, on mechanical properties of single crystalline NiAl and FeAl intermetallics. In April 1996 she joined the Eicke Weber group, Mat.Sci.&Eng. Department at UC Berkeley. There, she worked on MBE-grown III-V semiconductor production, material characterization and prototype electronic device development. She invented a radiation-hard buffer layer for satellite electronics, and later specialized in radiation effects of high bandgap semiconductors. Since 2008 her research has been continuing in the Oscar Dubon group, with a focus on TEM characterization of semiconductor and catalytic materials. She collaborates with Dr. Christian Kisielowski since 2010.

Dr. Specht has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, her h-index is 25.

Manling Sui is a Chair Professor and the Director of Academic Committee of Faculty of Materials and Manufacturing at Beijing University of Technology (BJUT). She received her Ph.D. in 1991 from Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Science, and successively worked at Northeastern University (China), University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), and Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Then she joined BJUT as a Chair Professor of Cheung Kong Scholars Programme in 2009. Her research is focused on in situ electron microscopy for structure and property relationship in advanced materials, mechanisms for the performance and structure evolution of energy and catalytic materials in the applied fields (heat, electricity, light, etc.) and environment (liquid and gas), and low dose electron microscopy for the study of electron beam sensitive materials. She has published more than 200 papers in the peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Nature Materials, Nature Photonics, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, Advanced Materials, ASC Nano, Nano Letters, Acta Materialia etc. Her papers have been cited more than 10000 times by SCI papers.

Wen-Xin Tang, Professor of Chongqing University, acting as research director of Electron Microscopy Center and director of Laboratory for ultrafast Transient facility（LUTF). Professor Tang is expert in surface science and surface electron microscope field. His main work is focusing on dynamic physics in low dimensional system including magnetism and semiconductors.

Knut Urban is a German physicist. He studied at the University of Stuttgart where he obtained his doctor degree in physics in 1972, before moving to the Max Planck Institute of Metals Research in Stuttgart.

In 1986 he was appointed a professor in materials sciences at Erlangen–Nuremberg University, and just one year later became Chair of Experimental Physics at RWTH Aachen University and the Director of the Institute of Microstructure Research at Forschungszentrum Juelich. The institute's research focuses on phases and phase transformations as well as lattice defects in metals and alloys, HTc superconductivity and superconducting devices, and atomic structures in complex oxides. From 1990 he collaborated with Harald Rose and Maximilian Haider to construct the first aberration-corrected transmission electron microscope. With this Urban realized atomic resolution in electron microscopy in materials for the first time (published in 1998).

Urban then worked on the application of aberration-corrected atomically resolving transmission electron microscopy to materials science. In particular he focused on the connection between the precise arrangement of atoms within a lattice and the physical properties of a material. In 2004 he was chosen as one of the two directors of the Juelich-Aachen Ernst Ruska Center for Microscopy and Spectroscopy with Electrons and since 2012 has been a JARA Senior (Distinguished) Professor at RWTH Aachen University. Urban served as President of the German Physical Society from 2004 to 2006.

Urban has been awarded a number of honors. These include the Von Hippel Award of the US Materials Research Society, and jointly with Rose and Haider, the Wolf Prize in Physics, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the HONDA prize in Ecotechnology and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences. He is an honorary member of several scientific bodies, including the US Materials Research Society, the German Physical Society and the Japanese Institute of Metals and Materials.

Professor Wang is a Cryo-electron microscopist, Director of Cryo-electron Microscopy Center at the Southern University of Science and Technology. He studied for the degree of D. Phil in the Department of Materials at the University of Oxford in the early of 1990's, and then worked as a research fellow at serval universities in France and the UK. In 2000, he was granted a permanent position at the University of Sheffield, and moved to the University of Leeds, UK in 2007 before jointed the Southern University of Science and Technology in 2018. His research interests mainly in the application of high-resolution electron microscopy in the field of materials science and the structural biology. The research areas include macromolecular complex and viruses. He has published more than 60 articles in "Nature", "Science", "Cell" and other internationally renowned journals.

Zhu-Jun Wang is an expert on both electron microscopy and heterogeneous catalysis. He has successfully constructed the surface sensitive near-ambient-pressure in-situ scanning electron microscopy (SEM) during his doctoral research. With this technique, the detailed atomic-scale information obtained by in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM)/ scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) can be embedded within the global picture obtained at lower magnifications by in-situ SEM and subsequently correlated with the spectroscopic data from near ambient pressure in-situ X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (NAP-XPS). This multi-scale approach enables to investigate the dynamic nature of catalyst during the ongoing work, bridges the pressure-gap, and links atomistic details to collective processes. One typical work is the analysis of surface dynamics, from the micrometer- to the atomic-scale, at well-controlled experimental environments to obtain a fundamental understanding of the mechanism of graphene and two dimensional (2D) materials growth on metal catalyst.

Xingxu Yan received his B.S. (2010) and Ph.D. (2015) in Materials Science and Engineering at Tsinghua University. He is currently an Assistant Project Scientist in Professor Xiaoqing Pan’s group at University of California, Irvine after finishing a postdoctoral period in the same group. His research interest focuses on monochromated electron energy-loss spectroscopy (EELS) and vibrational structure of emerging materials.

Dr Zhao Jiong graduated from Tsinghua University. Currently he is associate professor in Applied Physics Department of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is the co-founder of the Atomic Electron Microscopy Centre of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which was established in UMF, PolyU, 2023. His main research area is low-dimensional physics especially two dimensional materials and in situ electron microscopy. He has applied and developed in situ mechanical/electrical/heating/beam environmental tests on carbon nanotubes, Si nanowires, graphene and relevant 2D materials, and experimentally obtained their atomic structures, chemistry and physical properties. The atomic structures and dynamical responses in atomic scale have been observed/revealed. These previous relevant research works have been published in renowned journals such as Science, Nature Nanotechnology, PNAS, Nature communications, Science Advances, etc, with Dr Zhao as the first/corresponding authors.

Dr. Xiaoyan Zhong is currently an associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2001 and PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2007 at Tsinghua University. After three-year postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory in USA, he began his independent academic career as assistant professor and associate professor at Tsinghua University from 2010 to 2020. He joined Department of Materials Science and Engineering at City University of Hong Kong since May 2020. His current research interests involve methodology development of transmission electron microscopy and spectroscopy and their application in solving new challenges in magnetic materials. Recently Zhong's group has developed the quantitative atomic-plane resolved electron magnetic circular dichroism method and pushed spatial resolution of magnetic circular dichroism into atomic level by achromatic electron microscopy, which was published in the peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications and Advanced Functional Materials. He received “Ten Major Scientific and Technological Progress of China's Colleges and Universities” awarded by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China and the Excellent Young Scholar awarded by Chinese Electron Microscopy Society.

Wu Zhou is a Professor in School of Physical Sciences and leads the electron microscopy laboratory at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in Beijing, China. He received his B.S. degree in 2006 from Tsinghua University and his Ph.D. in 2010 from Lehigh University. His research is mainly focused on the development of cutting-edge electron microscopy techniques with high spatial and energy resolution, and the application of electron microscopy to unveil the origin of functionalities in 2D materials, heterogenous catalysts and quantum materials.

Ye Zhu received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. He is currently an associate professor in the Department of Applied Physics, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His research focuses on cutting-edge electron microscopy techniques and their application on novel material characterization.