Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Department of Physics and Astronomy Collins Research Group

2024 ALS User’s Meeting – Devin and Thomas invited as Early Career Panelist Members

Current graduate student Devin Grabner and former student Dr. Thomas Ferron (2019) were invited to speak on the Early Career Panel at the 2024 Advanced Light Source (ALS) Users Meeting. Devin Grabner was recently hired part-time by the Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division while finishing his last year of graduate school. Dr. Ferron is finishing his second Post-Doc position at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and will be transitioning to a staff scientist position either there or at the ALS.

The panelists were scientists from Industry, Academia, DoE Laboratory (Ferron), and DoD Laboratory (Grabner). There was a lot of positive engagement with well-received responses from the panel members.

Short bios on each panelist can be found here: https://als.lbl.gov/2024-user-meeting-speakers/#earlycareer

Devin publishes in-situ polysoap micelle nanostructure

Graduate student Devin Grabner’s work on characterizing in-situ nanostructure and loading of novel polysoap micelles has been published in Langmuir. The work reveals the impressive capture and loading of aromatic cargo for therapeutics and water purification.  In-situ characterization shows this is due to an open corona structure likely controlled through macroion charging.  The work titled “Molecular weight-independent “polysoap” nanostructure characterized via in-situ resonant soft X-ray scattering” was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Phillip Picket at the University of Southern Mississippi and NIST as well as former Collins Lab postdoc Dr. Terry McAfee now at Berkeley National Laboratory.  Congratulations to all authors!

Read the article Molecular Weight-Independent “Polysoap” Nanostructure Characterized via In Situ Resonant Soft X-ray Scattering | Langmuir (acs.org)

Collins Group Presents at 2019 APS March Meeting

Thomas Ferron, Victor Murcia, Terry McAfee, and Brian Collins all presented at the 2019 APS March Meeting in Boston, MA. Victor, Terry, and Brian all presented in the Focus Session on “Advanced Morphological Characterization in Polymers” where Brian gave the Invited Talk for the session.

Victor presented his work on combining NEXAFS measurements and DFT of molecules to create more accurate optical models for analysis of polarized resonant soft X-ray scattering (RSoXS). Terry discussed his work with developing in-situ capabilities in RSoXS showing quantitative characterization of polymer micelle structure and dynamics without using chemical labels.

Thomas presented in the Focus Session on Organic Electronics where he discussed his recent paper on charge separation affected by molecular mixing at the donor-acceptor interface in organic photovoltaic devices.