Jinschek focused on energy, environment, and materials sustainability

Posted: 

Joerg Jinschek is contributing to The Ohio State University’s efforts to make a global impact in energy, environment, and materials sustainability as an associate professor in materials science and engineering and in the university’s Discovery Theme examining materials and manufacturing for sustainability.

Discovery Themes focus on critical societal needs, reflecting Ohio State’s obligation as a public, urban, land-grant, research university. Together with partners from industry, a team of researchers like Jinschek is pursuing advances in materials, manufacturing and energy technologies to propel societal progress with a net positive impact on the environment.

Jinschek received his Master of Science in Physics (’97) and his PhD in Solid State Physics (’01), respectively, from the Friedrich-Schiller-University in Jena, Germany. He was awarded with a Feodor-Lynen-Fellowship of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation, and performed his post-doctoral research at the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Berkeley, Calif. He was an assistant professor of research and director of the Electron Microscopy Lab at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Most recently he’s held various positions at FEI, including senior application scientist and senior marketing manager for aberration-corrected and in-situ microscopy.

Jinschek has expertise in aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy and in environmental transmission electron microscopy in particular. His most highly cited papers discuss methods for single atom detection in graphene, methods to determine atomic positions in gold crystals using electron tomography, and methods to visualize surface reconstruction in catalysts. He has authored two review publications focusing on in-situ transmission electron microscopy.

A theme in this work is the ability to extract structural information about materials at the atomic scale using advanced electron microscopy methodologies. Recently his work has focused on the improvement of environmental transmission electron microscopy, including the development of in-situ holders, resulting in the ability to study gas-solid interactions in functional nanomaterials with atomic resolution.

“At any stage in research and development, studies of these nanomaterials’ structure, property, and function are critical, including detailed atomic-scale insights,” Jinschek said. “To our advantage, atomic scale electron microscopy, or EM, has become a powerful and indispensable tool for characterizing those nanostructures.”

Jinschek’s ongoing activities concentrate on methodological aspects of state-of-the-art EM, opening routes towards atom-sensitive imaging of nanostructures that plays a crucial role in numerous applications in materials research and development.

“The actual state and function of nanomaterials ‘in operation’ cannot always be inferred from examination under standard EM conditions or from postmortem studies,” Jinschek explained. “In-situ and operando techniques enable characterization of nanostructures under operational or environmental conditions, thereby providing new insights in important materials science questions, including basic phenomena associated with materials’ dynamic behavior, growth, phase transformations, stability, and more.”