2022 Lloyd Rees Lecture

Distinguished Professor Dmitri Golberg

The Australian Academy of Science presents the 2022 Lloyd Rees Lecture. Delayed from 2022, Distinguished Professor Dmitri Golberg will give his lecture on Thursday 2 November 2023 at CSIRO in Clayton.

About the lecture

Unique possibilities of modern electron microscopy for physical property exploration of nanomaterials

The knowledge of electrical, mechanical, thermal and optoelectronic properties of nanomaterials is of prime importance as far as their smart integration into modern technologies is concerned. However, typically, such properties have been measured using instruments having no direct access to the material atomic structure, its defects, crystallography and spatially resolved chemistry. This drawback largely limits the relevance of data because many structural features of a nanomaterial prior, during and after its testing have been hidden. Therefore, the acquired results cannot be linked to a particular material morphology, its atomic structure, and defects’ network. This shortcoming has confused engineers and technologists, and leads to many uncertainties with respect to realistic nanomaterials’ applications and industrial potentials.

Professor Golberg will demonstrate the full usefulness of state-of-the-art in situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques for properties/functions analysis of diverse frontier materials, e.g., carbon, boron nitride and dichalcogenide nanotubes and nanosheets, inorganic nanowires, nanoparticles and nanocomposites. Elasticity, plasticity, fracture strength and toughness, electrical resistivity, thermal gradients, photocurrents, photovoltages and spatially resolved luminescence of a nanomaterial may now be unambiguously determined inside TEM, while employing piezo-driven probes, sensors and nanomanipulators and/or optical fibers inserted into the TEM column.

About the speaker

Dmitri Golberg is a Distinguished Professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He is Co-Director of the QUT Centre for Materials Science, and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellow. His research is devoted to the synthesis, structural analysis, and physical property measurements of low-dimensional inorganic nanomaterials. In 1995, after receiving his PhD and a ten-year research career at a research institute in Moscow, Russia, he joined the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) in Tsukuba, Japan. He moved to QUT in 2017 after more than 20 years of Nanotube Group Leadership at NIMS.

Dmitri is the author of more than 750 original papers in peer-reviewed international journals and cited more than 60,000 times. He has also registered more than 130 Japanese, European and US patents, authored numerous book chapters, and delivered more than 150 invited, keynote and plenary lectures at a range of  international scientific forums. During his career Dmitri has received the prestigious Tsukuba Prize (2005), Thomson Reuters Research Front Award (2012), the Seto Prize by the Japan Microscopy Society (2016), and the NIMS President Award (2017). He was placed within a cohort of highly cited researchers in materials science (top 1%) by Thomson Reuters from 2014 to 2022. In 2019 and 2021 The Australian named Dmitri in the top five most established materials scientists of Australia.

About the award

In 1990 Sir Alan Walsh FAA proposed that the Australian Academy of Science initiate a series of lectures by distinguished researchers in chemical physics, to recognise the contributions of the late Dr A L G Rees FAA to science, industry and education.

Find out more about the Lloyd Rees Lecture series.