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What I do

I am working on automated experiments with a focus on self-driving microscopy.

An experiment is a procedure to support or disprove a hypothesis, make a discovery, or demonstrate a fact. To design a proper scientific experiment, scientists must develop and organize many detailed steps. Then, well-designed experiments are often performed by experienced scientists/operators followed by results analyses. If a experiment is to support or disprove a hypothesis, replication of identical steps is often needed to remove random assignment; if a experiment is to demonstrate a fact or make a discovery, follow-up experiments are often designed to dig the corresponding mechanism.

Automated experiment is the practice of designing and performing experiments, as well as analyzing results and designing follow-up experiments, in an automated manner without human intervention. In microscopy experiments, the search of materials’ functionality often relies on manual exploration by human operators based on prior knowledge or intuition. The rapid growth in machine learning over the last decade makes the community to think about driving microscopy experiments with machine learning methods in an automated manner. My work is implementing machine learning methods in operating microscopy to make it fly and discover physics without human intervention, namely, self-driving microscopy.

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About me

Currently, I am a scientist working in the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I received B.S. in materials chemistry from the School of Chemistry, Nankai University in 2014. Then, I started Ph.D. study in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016 and graduated in 2020. My graduate research, about understanding ferroelectric and optoelectronic materials using multimodal chemical and functional imaging microscopy, has been recognized through the Materials Research Society Graduate Student Award, American Vacuum Society Graduate Research Award, and Joseph E. Spruiell Award for Excellence in Research. My current research interests are developing machine learning-driven automated and autonomous scanning probe microscopy to explore physics in an automated manner without human intervention.

Award

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