Professor Nigel Browning

Dr Nigel Browning is currently the Chair of Electron Microscopy in the School of Engineering and the School of Physical Sciences at the University of Liverpool.  He received his undergraduate degree in Physics from the University of Reading, UK and his PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge, UK.  After completing his PhD in 1992, he joined the Solid State Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as a postdoctoral research associate before taking a faculty position in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 1995.  In 2002, he moved to the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at the University of California-Davis (UCD) and also held a joint appointment in the National Center for Electron Microscopy (NCEM) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).  In 2005 he moved the joint appointment from LBNL to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to become project leader for the Dynamic Transmission Electron Microscope (DTEM).  In 2009, he also joined the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UCD to focus on the development of the DTEM to study live biological structures.  From 2011-2017 he was a Laboratory Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Director of the Chemical Imaging Initiative, a $42M program designed to change the paradigm in operando imaging methods for imaging energy materials and processes.  He has over 25 years of experience in the development of new methods in electron microscopy for high spatial, temporal and spectroscopic resolution analysis of engineering and biological structures.  His research has been supported by DOE, NSF, NIH, DOD and by industry, leading to research projects for over 30 graduate students and 35 postdoctoral research fellows.  He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Microscopy Society of America (MSA).  He received the Burton Award from the Microscopy Society of America in 2002 and the Coble Award from the American Ceramic Society in 2003 for the development of atomic resolution methods in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM).  With his collaborators at LLNL he also received R&D 100 and Nano 50 Awards in 2008, and a Microscopy Today Innovation Award in 2010 for the development of the dynamic transmission electron microscope (DTEM).  He has over 350 publications (h-index=74) and has given over 300 invited presentations on the development and application of advanced TEM methods.