Interview with Dr. Pedram Roushan
Pedram Roushan was born and raised in Iran. In 2001, he moved to the US as a religious refugee and attended Pitt, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2005. During his years at Pitt, he worked at the laboratories of X. L. Wu and W. Goldberg, focusing on the dynamics in 2D fluids. He received his PhD in 2011 from Princeton University, performing the first scanning tunneling microscopy on the surface of topological insulators in the lab of A. Yazdani. After three years of post-doctoral studies in the J. Martinis lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014 he joined the Google quantum hardware lab aiming on making a quantum computer. The current focus of his research is on simulating condensed matter systems with engineered quantum platforms.
Congratulations to Jill Millstone on her new position as Associate Editor at ACS Nano. She has been an extremely active ACS Nano author and advisor, since even before she joined their editorial advisory board. In 2011, she joined the Chemistry Department at the University of Pittsburgh, where she has received awards including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the ACS Unilever Award and the Cottrell Research Scholar Award. She is also a member of the editorial advisory board of ACS Nano, beginning January 2016. Her group studies the chemical mechanisms underpinning metal nanoparticle synthesis, surface chemistry, and optoelectronic behaviors. She acted as a mentor and instructor at the Cottrell Scholar Collaborative supported workshop for new faculty as well as a mentor at the Global Young Academy Women in Science Leadership Initiative, the first workshop hosted by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in the fall of 2016.
The primary goal of the CRDF Small Grants Program is to enhance opportunities for faculty, especially early career faculty, at the University of Pittsburgh to engage in high-quality research, scholarship, and creative endeavors. Awards may range from $2,000 to $16,000. This year, applicants who integrate undergraduate research experiences into their proposed work may request an additional $2,000. The maximum dollar amount that may be awarded this year is $18,000. 
Overview of NETL Cross Cutting Research Program and Funding Opportunities with Dr. Briggs White, Technology Manager, Cross Cutting Research NET will be held on Thursday, January 04, 2018 between 12:00 PM and 01:00 PM at 102 Benedum Hall. Dr. Briggs White is an experienced engineering management professional with a demonstrated history of working in the research industry. Currently, Dr. White is serving as Crosscutting Technology Manager at NETL. 
To extend our fundamental knowledge of the quantum world to enable the development of novel, transformative technologies, and opportunity to train students in this area is available via the “Quantum Information Science and Engineering.
The Quantum Computing Summer School is an immersive 10-week curriculum that includes tutorials from world-leading experts in quantum computation as well as one-on-one mentoring from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) staff scientists who are conducting cutting-edge quantum computing research. Summer school fellowship recipients will be exposed to the theoretical foundations of quantum computation and will become skilled at programming commercial quantum computers, such as those developed by D-Wave Systems and IBM. Ten students will be awarded a fellowship from LANL that covers travel, living expenses in Los Alamos, and salary, with a fellowship value ranging from $7,500 to $13,000, based on academic rank (junior, senior, 1st year graduate student, etc.).
Susan Fullerton and her colleagues wrote a scientific report on deconvoluting the photonic and electronic response of two-dimensional (2D) materials for the case of molybdenum disulfide (MoS2). What are the main criteria which provide evidence that the material is “high quality”? Are the photonic properties or electronic performance? Susan Fullerton and her colleagues have studied the MoS2 materials and their devices to answer this question and to find the correlation between electronic and optical properties in 2D materials. In their study, they used Raman, photoluminescence (PL), time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL), high-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy (HR-STEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), field effect transistors (FET) fabrication electrolyte gate application methods to characterize MoS2.
Judith C. Yang and her colleagues answered the question of how dislocations nucleate and migrate at heterointerfaces in dissimilar-material systems on their recently published article on Nature Materials. n this study, Judith Yang and her colleagues showed that atomic segregation acts as a source for generating dislocations for the first time. They have used Cu–Au alloy system for studying surface segregation. Real-time transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to both spatially and temporally resolve the transition of the coherent, dislocation free interface between a Cu3Au-segregated surface and a Cu(Au) crystal substrate into a semi-coherent structure through the nucleation and subsequent migration of misfit accommodating dislocations. They combined their experimental study with the teory by using density functional theory (DFT) and molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. They discovered a mechanism for dislocation nucleation and migration driven by surface segregation of solute atoms in a solid solution. Their results show that the surface-segregation-induced composition variations act as the source of strain/stress that drives the nucleation and migration of misfit dislocations, and demonstrate how the surface segregation phenomenon of an alloy constituent can be employed for developing atomistic insight into understanding the formation processes of misfit-accommodating dislocations.