Social and Racial Justice and the Wisconsin MRSEC

The MRSEC Executive Committee has chosen to undertake the 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge. The challenge is to take at least one action per day for twenty-one days to build equity and justice. What does that look like? The Challenge website provides a long list of resources, from articles and books to read, podcasts to listen to, and documentaries and interviews to watch, to organizations to connect with and activities to focus our attention on the racial context of the world around us. The Executive Committee commits to tracking our progress on the Challenge and to using it to help us form new habits of mind that will inform future decision making for the center.

Dallin Awarded the 2020 Wisconsin MRSEC Excellence in Open Science Prize

The MRSEC Open Science prize recognizes a researcher or research team that has demonstrated an exceptional effort or success in the development and dissemination of impactful data for the scientific community. With the transformative developments in data access and analytics, development and dissemination of impactful data sets is an increasingly important part of modern materials science. This prize seeks to encourage researchers to develop innovative strategies to share their data.

Poster Showing Control and Tuning of Molecular Organization in Vapor-Deposited Glasses Presented at Gordon Conference by MRSEC Graduate Student

Camille Bishop, a 5th-year graduate student working in Mark Ediger’s group as part of the MRSEC IRG 1, presented her work on liquid crystal-like order in vapor-deposited glasses at the Gordon Conference on Liquid Crystals in New London, NH that took place from July 7th-12th, 2019. The conference brings together researchers in a diverse range of disciplines involving liquid crystal science and technology.

(2019) Strain Mapping with a Fast TEM Camera

The Wisconsin MRSEC is developing an ultrafast direct electron camera for use on a scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) in its Shared Instrument Facilities. One application of the camera will be experiments to map strains – tiny variations in the distance between atoms – inside materials caused by defects in the crystal lattice or interfaces between two different materials. The MRSEC acquired an existing, slower camera to support technique development before the new camera arrives. An example strain map is shown to the right. The gray-scale image is a small Nb particle formed inside a larger Zr crystal. The color image shows the rotation of the Zr lattice caused by the interface between the two materials. Higher sensitivity maps covering larger areas with more points will be possible with the new camera.