With the support of funding from the MRSEC Honored Scholar Travel Award, Shuoyuan Huang traveled to Honolulu Hawaii and presented a talk at the Spring MRS meeting in May, 2022. Huang is a graduate student in Materials Science and Engineering in Professor Paul Voyles’ lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Huang’s talk, “In situ TEM and STEM characterization of local structure and dynamics in supercooled liquids with an ultrafast camera,” was presented at the Advances in In Situ and Operando TEM Methods for the Study of Dynamic Processes in Materials symposium.
This was the first in-person conference Huang had attended and the first gathering with a lot of different people for a long time due to the recent pandemic.
“The feeling of engaging with academics and professionals in different fields face to face was very refreshing,” said Huang. “By attending a combination of topics including modeling, machine learning, amorphous materials, and nanostructures, I got to hear from different perspectives of the general research field that includes my specific focus.”
Huang shared that one particular interaction proved to be helpful for his research. He got to speak with another student from Seoul National University during his poster session.
“This talk became very enlightening for my research since I have been struggling with my own in situ 4D-STEM dataset on supercooled liquid with an even higher complexity,” explained Huang. “The machine-learning approach they developed, or at least the general idea of it could provide a future direction for my own work.”
During the conference, Huang also learned about various new characterization and data analysis techniques for in situ electron microscopy. Talks from researchers at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs included information on the most advanced data collecting, denoising, and analysis pipelines. A few talks about a real-time analysis platform for in situ microscopy from other facilities were also informative.
“These newest methods and ideas helped me grasp the further direction of 4D STEM research field and gave me a notion of what our future data collection and analysis on amorphous materials could look like,” said Huang.