Berkeley Lab Researchers Receive DOE Early Career Research Awards

Three scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science to receive funding through the Early Career Research Program (ECRP).

The Department of Energy today announced the selection of 91 early career scientists from across the nation to receive funding for research as part of the program. This year’s awardees represent 50 universities and 12 DOE National Laboratories across the country.

The ECRP program, now in its 15th year, bolsters the nation’s scientific workforce by supporting exceptional researchers at the outset of their careers, when many scientists do their most formative work. Awards to an institution of higher education will be approximately $875,000 over five years and the minimum request for awards to a DOE national laboratory or Office of Science user facility are approximately $2,750,000 over five years.

This year’s Berkeley Lab awardees and their projects are listed below:

Jeffrey Donatelli is a staff scientist in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Research Division who is researching new mathematics and computational methods for analyzing experimental data. In a variety of scientific fields, new types of experiments are producing large and complex data sets based on extremely sensitive measurements taken at high speed. These data contain a wealth of insights, but existing analysis techniques are starting to run into limitations in extracting accurate and detailed information from many of them. Donatelli’s ECRP project, “Multi-Tiered Algorithms for Solving Extreme-Scale Inverse Problems Emerging from New Experiments,” aims to develop a new class of data-analysis algorithms incorporating advanced analytic, statistical, and machine learning methods that can resolve the mathematical and physical attributes of the underlying system to overcome these limitations.

This work will provide scientists with the capability to extract information about physical phenomena, biological specimens, and materials in unprecedented detail. For example, the new approaches can be used to solve the 3D structure of uncrystallized proteins with DOE’s advanced free-electron laser, or the geometry of a crystal lattice from data generated by next-generation microscopes.

Jennifer Pore is a research scientist at Berkeley Lab, working within both the Heavy Element Group in the Nuclear Science Division and the Heavy Element Chemistry Group in the Chemical Sciences Division. Her research falls at the intersection of chemistry and nuclear physics. The Periodic Table of Elements is well-known for elegantly organizing elements by their chemical properties – but it’s possible that the heaviest elements at the bottom of the chart are not in the right place. Studying them is difficult because they do not exist naturally on Earth, and are radioactive, with very short lifespans. Pore’s project, “Investigating the Fundamental Properties of the Heaviest Elements,” will use advanced experimental techniques to extract crucial data from just a handful of atoms and reevaluate the placement of these tricky elements. The studies could potentially reshape the periodic table as we know it. Pore also received FY21-23 Early Career Development LDRD funding for “Studies of Evolving Chemistry along Isotopic Chains” to further explore how heavy elements behave.

Carolin Sutter-Fella is a staff scientist working on the synthesis and real-time characterization of energy materials in the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience user facility at Berkeley Lab. Sutter-Fella’s ECRP project, “Accelerated Robotic Design of Energy Materials (ACE Lab),” aims to integrate robotics with machine learning to accelerate the discovery of new energy and quantum information materials called chiral perovskites. In collaboration with the Advanced Light Source and the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA), the ACE Lab – which will be available to the materials science community through the Molecular Foundry’s user program – will allow researchers to discover new energy materials and tune their functional properties in real time during synthesis. Among her many honors, Sutter-Fella is also the recipient of a 2017 Berkeley Lab Early Career Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) award for her project, “In-situ Investigation of Chemical Precursor Transformation: Towards a Predictive Science of Synthesis.”

A complete list of this year’s ECRP awardees is available on the Office of Science website.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to delivering solutions for humankind through research in clean energy, a healthy planet, and discovery science. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 16 Nobel Prizes. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.