Invited speakers

Grace Burke is a professor in the School of Materials, The University of Manchester

Director - Materials Performance Centre

Director - Electron Microscopy Centre

Will Chueh is an Assistant Professor in the Materials Science & Engineering department and a Center Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University. He received his B.S. in Applied Physics, M.S. and Ph.D. (2010) in Materials Science from Caltech. Prior to joining Stanford in 2012, he was a Distinguished Truman Fellow at Sandia National Laboratories. Prof. Chueh has received numerous honors, including the NSF CAREER Award (2015), Solid State Ionics Young Scientist Award (2013), Caltech Demetriades-Tsafka-Kokkalis Prize in Energy (2012), and the American Ceramics Society Diamond Award (2008). In 2012, he was named as one of the “top 35 innovators under the age of 35” by MIT’s Technology Review.

Hongjun Gao is a professor in the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Member of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World

Deputy director, the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Prof. Shuji Hasegawa’s group at the Department of Physics, University of Tokyo, investigates charge and spin transport at surface electronic states of crystals, such as monolayer superconductivity, spin-polarized current and spin current at surfaces.

Andreas Heinrich leads a research team at IBM's Almaden Research Center focused on exploring atomic-scale structures for possible applications in computation and data-storage. In 2012 his team reported the storage and retrieval of 1 bit of digital information in only 12 magnetic atoms, about 100,000 times smaller than commercial magnetic devices. In 2014 his team pioneered coherent spin manipulation of single atoms on surfaces by employing high-frequency spin resonance in a low temperature STM. Heinrich studies the world of atoms and structures, built with atomic-scale precision, and educates the public on nanoscience as demonstrated by the 2013 release of the movie “A Boy and his Atom”. Heinrich’s team has a strong focus on advancing the experimental capabilities of state-of-the-art research tools. A native of Germany, Heinrich received his PhD in 1998 from the University of Goettingen and joined IBM in the same year as a postdoc in Dr. Donald Eigler’s team.

Andrew Westphal is a Research Physicist and Senior Fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory at U. C. Berkeley. He got his PhD at Berkeley in 1992 in high-energy astrophysics, and migrated to planetary science about a decade ago. He has been intensively involved in analyses of the cometary and interstellar collections returned by the Stardust mission. Most recently he was the leader of the Interstellar Preliminary Examination for the Stardust mission, and is involved in the planning for new missions, including an new interstellar dust mission and a mission to collect a surface sample from a comet.