Welcome to IMN, Prof. Philipp Pelz!

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Prof. Dr. Philipp Pelz

We warmly welcome Prof. Philipp Pelz, who started his professorship for Computational Materials Microscopy at the IMN in August this year.

 

Before joining the IMN, he was a postdoctoral researcher working on computational electron microscopy with Prof. Mary Scott in the Materials Science Department at UC Berkeley and Dr. Colin Ophus at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His past scientific work included the application of phase-contrast imaging methods to single-particle cryo-EM during his Ph.D. with Prof. R.J. Dwayne Miller at the Max Planck Institute for Structure and Dynamics of Matter. He further produced the first low-dose computational phase-contrast images of biological macromolecules, enabled imaging of the organic linker molecules of beam-sensitive metal-organic frameworks under room-temperature conditions and recently successfully pursued atomic-resolution phase-contrast tomography.

Sketch of a 4D-STEM experiment with sparse electron counts. For more details, please refer to the publication.

Using the excellent microscopy equipment available at CENEM, he will further refine his advanced computational microscopy techniques using 2D and 3D phase-contrast imaging from 4D-STEM measurements, and expand his research into correlative microscopy topics with electron-, X-ray and atom-probe tomography. Cutting-edge 4D-STEM techniques will require a fast direct electron detector equipped to one of CENEM’s state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopes, with the aim to allow for, amongst other, low-dose imaging and real-time reconstructions of experimental phase-contrast data. Such a fast 4D camera runs at up to ~100.000 frames per second, bringing into reach the goal of phase-contrast tomography at atomic resolution. Realizing this goal requires extensive work with data management and compression strategies to work with large-scale 4D-STEM datasets with millions of diffraction measurements, reducing terabyte-scale datasets to a few gigabytes.

In this regard, Prof. Philipp Pelz is currently hiring and offering a position as Postdoctoral Scientist Computational Microscopy (m/f/x)

 

 

We are looking forward to exciting forefront research at IMN & CENEM!