The MSREC Honored Scholar Travel Award enabled Nicholas Hagopian to attend the 2024 Microscopy and Microanalysis conference held in Cleveland, Ohio. Hagopian, a PhD student in the Voyles group, conducts research on characterizing materials and interfaces with scanning transmission electron microscopy at atomic resolution.
The conference is attended by scientists in a range of fields and across a range of microscopy disciplines, from visible light to electron microscopy and in fields including biology, materials science, and physics. The wide range of subjects provided a plethora of unique and interesting talks to attend.
At the conference, Hagopian presented a poster on a branch of his research related to characterization of 2D materials, titled “High Resolution Surface Modification of WS2 via Plasma Oxidation and Electron Beam Reduction” (https://doi.org/10.1093/mam/ozae044.602). The work was a collaboration between the Voyles and Rhodes groups, leveraging the unique monolayer-terminated oxidation properties of transition metal dichalcogenides and the high-precision reduction capabilities of an electron beam in a scanning transmission electron microscope to create surface-confined W-nanoparticles across a range of morphologies with feature sizes as small as ~1.7 nm and pitches as small as 3.2 nm. The poster received interest from conference members and spurred engaging scientific discussion.
In addition, Hagopian was a co-author on a paper written by Jingrui Wei, another member of the Voyles group. The paper highlighted a novel electron counting technique developed by Wei, which enhanced detector accuracy and improved dataset quality. The paper (https://doi.org/10.1093/micmic/ozad132) received a “2024 Best Paper in Instrumentation and Software” award issued by the publishing journal, Microscopy and Microanalysis.