Ambient Pressure Spectroscopy in Complex Chemical Environments

Dr. Ashley Head is a staff scientist at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where she manages a laboratory-based ambient pressure photoelectron spectrometer and various infrared spectrometers. In addition to helping users at the CFN facility, she conducts research in the surface science of metal oxides under in situ and operando conditions. She received her BSc in chemistry from James Madison University in 2005.
For her PhD in physical inorganic chemistry from the University of Arizona, she studied inter- and intramolecular interactions of inorganic molecules with photoelectron spectroscopy. After graduating in 2011, she entered the realm of surface science with studies of atomic layer deposition mechanisms of metal oxides
at Lund University, Sweden, during a postdoc position with Prof. Joachim Schnadt during 2012 through 2015. From Sweden, Ashley moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for another postdoc position with Hendrik Bluhm in the Chemical

Sciences Division and the Advanced Light Source. Her research interests focus around metal oxides, including understanding metal oxide deposition mechanisms, the role of oxides in catalytic mechanisms, and the chemical and electronic similarities between metal oxides and metal-organic frameworks.

Dr. Slavomir Nemsak is a beamline scientist at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory working on ambient-pressure X-ray photoemission instruments at soft and tender X-ray beamlines. His research group specializes in studying buried functional interfaces used in energy conversion, energy storage, electronics, and electrochemistry. He received his PhD. In Surface Physics at Charles University in Prague in 2008. As a topic of his PhD work, he studied
supported bimetallic catalysts using X-ray spectroscopy techniques, including synchrotron-based
experiments. After graduating, he became a Japanese Society for Promotion of Science postdoctoral
fellow at National Institute for

Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan in the group of Dr. Michiko
Yoshitake, working on ultra-thin alumina layers and their applications in electronics. In 2011, he
joined the group of Prof. Charles Fadley at University of California, Davis and Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory, where he stayed as a postdoc specializing in X-ray standing wave photoemission
to study solid-solid and solid-liquid interfaces. In 2014, before coming to the Advanced Light Source,
he became a group leader at Forschungszentrum Juelich, managing the Photoelectron emission
microscopy endstation at BESSY-II synchrotron in Berlin, Germany.

Dr. Baran Eren is a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, incumbent of the Alvin and Gertrude Levine career development chair, and Zuckerman STEM leadership faculty scholar. Hemanages his own research group specialized on investigating solid/gas and solid/liquid interfaces with scanning probe microscopies and vibrational and electron spectroscopies. Dr. Eren

was born in Turkey and received his BSc in mechanical engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul in 2007, and his MSc in micro-nano systems at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, in 2009.He completed his PhD with summa cum laude in experimental condensed matter physics in the group of Prof. Ernst Meyer at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2013. From January 2014 until joining the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel, in September 2017, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow, studying under
Prof. Miquel Salmeron and Prof. Gabor Somorjai, who are two pioneers in the field of surface science, in the Materials Sciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Dr. Eren is also a chess enthusiast, U.S. National Master in chess, and a former member of the Turkish
national team.