Kevin Ludwick, Newsletter Editor and Secretary/Treasurer
FECS recently held an election for three executive committee positions for next year: two Members-at-Large and the Chair-Elect. Many exceptional candidates applied for these positions, and we thank them all for their willingness to apply and serve. We encourage those who were not selected this year to apply next year as well!
The selected officers will start their positions next year after the March and April Meetings, and we look forward to working with them, as they are eager to serve. Thank you for voting, and please welcome these well-qualified officers. Below is some more information about them.
Shaowei Li (Chair-Elect) is a Heising-Simons Postdoctoral Fellow in the Physics Department, University of California Berkeley. His research focuses on developing a novel imaging technique combining laser and a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to shatter the diffraction limit and probe the inhomogeneous properties in low dimensional materials. The desire for observing finer details using optical microscopy particularly in bio-science and material-science is pushing technology developments beyond the diffraction limit. The coupling of photon excitation with electron tunneling at the junction of a scanning tunneling microscope combines the femtosecond sensitivity of a laser and the Angstrom resolution of tunneling electrons. The joint fs-A resolution will provide a new window for viewing the unique ultafast dynamics of individual nano-scale objects.
Shaowei received his Ph.D. in physics from UC Irvine in 2017. Prior to that, he received his bachelor's degree in physics from Nankai University in 2010. He spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University before joining UC Berkeley. His past work involves probing the physcial and chemical properties of single molecules and low-dimensional materials with optical techniques and STM.
Wennie Wang(Member-at-Large) is a computational materials scientist and currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Pritzker Institute for Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago. She earned her B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT in 2013 and her PhD in the Materials Department from UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 2018. Her research interests include first-principles methods for energy applications and currently encompass the study of complex oxides for water-splitting applications.
Daniel Borrero (Member-at-Large) is originally from Bogotá, Colombia, and he holds a BS in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin and an MS and a PhD in Physics from Georgia Tech. Since 2016, Prof. Borrero has been a member of the Physics faculty at Willamette University, a small liberal arts college in Salem, Oregon. At Willamette, Prof. Borrero's group focuses on studying fluid systems with complex spatiotemporal dynamics, including studies of the transition to turbulence in linearly-stable shear flows and self-organization in bouncing drop systems. Prof. Borrero has taught courses across the Physics major and has recently been involved with departmental efforts to incorporate scientific computation and promote career readiness throughout the curriculum, especially through laboratory and hands-on undergraduate research experiences. Prof. Borrero is currently a member of the Executive Board of the Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPhA) and a member of the Organizing Committee for the 72nd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics. He is also a member of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and has previously organized faculty development workshops on the instruction of workplace-ready skills in the undergraduate curriculum through ALPhA and the Partnership for Integration of Computation in Undergraduate Physics (PICUP).
