Kimberly Dick Thelander has been named Wallenberg scholar. The Wallenberg Scholar program focuses on Sweden’s leading senior researchers. It was implemented because researchers need long-term funding without the distraction of pressure to secure external grants in order to carry out world-class research. Kimberly got a grant of 17.5 MSEK total which can be freely used for research for five years with no restrictions.
Kimberly writes like this about her planned research:
Understanding the process of crystallization is of fundamental importance to fields ranging from geology to atmospheric science to pharmaceuticals. Within the modern materials engineering on which today’s information society is built, precise control of crystal growth plays a critical role in manipulating the properties of materials. Remarkably, many of the central questions underlying crystal growth are shared across a broad range of fields, involving the process and role of nucleation, the dynamics and structure of interfaces between phases, and the role of kinetics in determining crystal structure and morphology. It is extremely challenging, however, to access the fundamental atomic and nanoscale mechanisms underlying crystal growth and nucleation, as this requires methods that give atomic-scale spatial information at time scales appropriate to the process under realistic conditions. In this project we aim to explore fundamental processes in crystal growth using a unique in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) system integrated with chemical vapor deposition (CVD), for real-time observation of dynamic processes in semiconductor growth.