Paper MS-TuA4
The Molecular Foundry: A Knowledge-Based User Facility for Nanoscale Science

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 3:20 pm, Room 114

The Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides communities of users with access to expert staff and leading-edge instrumentation to enable research on the nanoscale in a multidisciplinary, collaborative environment. Selected through an external peer-reviewed proposal process, users come from academic, industrial or national laboratories, both domestic and international, free of charge. Located in the Bay Area’s active academic environment and near Silicon Valley, research is organized into seven closely coupled facilities: Inorganic, Organic, and Biological facilities for synthesis, preparation, and assembly; Nanofabrication, for processing and integration; the National Center for Electron Microscopy and Imaging and Manipulation, for characterization; and Theory, for understanding and predicting material properties. In summarizing the Foundry program, a selection of recent results will be highlighted such as those using automated high-throughput synthesis of nanocrystals, 2d materials, metal-organic frameworks, and sequence-specific polymers; aberration-corrected electron microscopy and electron tomography of individual proteins; 20 nm resolution optical spectroscopy; synthesis and simulations of nano-hybrid thermoelectrics and electrode-electrolyte interfaces; and interfaces between inorganic nanoscale building blocks with living cells.

The Molecular Foundry is supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.