FEATURED NEWS
Department of Defense funds UCLA-led research project, headed by Professor John Miao
By Nicole Wilkins
A team led by UCLA’s Jianwei “John” Miao, professor of physics and astronomy and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA, has received a $7.5 million research award from the Department of Defense as part of the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Program.
The research team led by Miao includes Prof. Jose Rodriguez of UCLA, Profs. Margaret Murnane and Henry Kapteyn of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Prof. William Chueh of Stanford University, and Prof. Laura Waller of UC Berkeley. The research project focus is: “Real‐Time Coherent X‐ray Imaging of Radiation‐Sensitive Materials at Sub‐10 nm Resolution.”
“Our interdisciplinary team will develop novel coherent diffractive imaging methods to capture the structure and dynamics of radiation-sensitive energy and biological materials with sub-10 nm spatial and sub-second temporal resolution,” said Miao, “We will achieve this challenging goal through close collaboration and cross fertilization, as well as functioning as an integrated team that is significantly more than the sum of the individual groups.”
“The MURI program has a long-standing history of funding research teams with creative and diverse solutions to complex problems,” said Ms. Heidi Shyu, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. “Not only does the program enable scientific breakthroughs with direct relevance for DoD applications, it also has been used to create and sustain new fields of inquiry. It is a program with a powerful legacy of scientific impact and remains a cornerstone of DoD’s basic research portfolio.”
The MURI program funding has been awarded to 31 teams located at 61 U.S. academic institutions. More information on the program can be found here as well as a summary of funded research projects.