Executive Council

The Executive Council consists of the elected representatives of the membership. According to the by-laws (Jan 2020 revision), “The Executive Council shall be composed of eleven (11) members: six Directors, one Commercial Director, and the following officers, the President, the President-Elect or Past-President, the Secretary, and the Treasurer.”

President (2024 – 2026)

Andy Herzing

Materials Research Engineer
Material Measurement Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD
Email: president -at- the-mas.org

Andrew Herzing is a materials research engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, MD. He received his Ph.D. from Lehigh University in 2007 under the supervision of Christopher Kiely. Andrew’s primary research interest is the development and application of advanced transmission electron microscopy techniques for materials characterization. He is currently focused on 4D-STEM of characterization of organic semiconductors and electron tomography of complex semiconductor device architectures.

President-Elect (2025 – 2026)

Assel Aitkaliyeva

Assistant Professor Nuclear Engineering Program
Department of Materials Science & Engineering
University of Florida
100 Rhines Hall
Gainesville, FL 32611
Email: aitkaliyeva -at- mse.ufl.edu

Assel Aitkaliyeva joined University of Florida in February 2017. Prior to joining UF, she held postdoc and staff scientist appointments at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). She still maintains a joint appointment with INL and frequently travels to INL to conduct microstructural characterization of irradiated nuclear fuels. Assel received her BS in Physics from Kazakh National University, MS in Nuclear Engineering and PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Texas A&M University. Her current research interests are in nuclear fuels and materials, with emphasis on the effects of irradiation on materials using a range of microscopy (FIB, SEM, S/TEM, EPMA, etc.) and in-situ micro-mechanical testing techniques.

Past President (vacant)

Past president

The past president position will be filled upon the expiration of the current President’s term in 2026.

Secretary (2023 – 2025)

Owen K. Neill

University of Michigan
1100 N University Ave.
2005 North University Bldg
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1005
E-mail: secretary -at- the-mas.org

Owen Neill holds a B.A. in Geology from Amherst College, a M.Sc. in Geology & Geophysics from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He spent four years as a research associate at Washington State University’s Peter Hooper GeoAnalytical Lab, and has been the manager of the Robert B. Mitchell Electron Microbeam Analysis Lab at the University of Michigan since 2017.

Treasurer (2025 – 2028)

Dale Burns

Research Scientist/Lab Manager
Stanford University
476 Lomita Mall
Stanford, CA 94305
E-mail: treasurer – at – the-mas.org

Dale Burns is a Research Scientist in the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. from Oregon State University in 2014 and has since worked as a research scientist/engineer in both the academic and private sectors. Dale moved to Stanford in 2016 where he manages the Stanford Microchemical Analysis Facility. His current research is focused on using integrated spatial-compositional datasets to understand high temperature phase equilibria in volcanic systems.

Commercial Director (2023 – 2025)

Steve Seddio

Applications Scientist
Thermo Fisher Scientific
5225 Verona Rd.
Fitchburg, WI 53711
Email: stephen.seddio-at-thermofisher.com

Steve has been a member of the MAS since 2011. He received his B.A. Degree (2007) in Planetary Sciences from the University of Rochester and his M.A. and Ph.D. (2013) in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis. After a brief stint of crater counting on Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons, and Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, his research interests shifted a bit closer to home and has mostly focused on studying evolved lunar lithologies using X-ray microanalysis. His favorite element is zirconium.

Steve is currently the WDS and EDS Product Specialist for Thermo Fisher Scientific in Madison, WI and helps customers optimize their analysis.

Third Year Directors (2023 – 2025)

Katherine (Kate) Burgess

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
Washington, District of Columbia

Kate Burgess is a geologist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in the Nanoscale Materials Section, which she joined first as a post-doc in 2014 before converting to an employee. She obtained her PhD in Geological Sciences from Brown University and was a post-doc at University of Hawaii prior to coming to NRL.

Her work focuses on planetary materials and using electron microscopy and nanoscale observations to understand Solar System evolution and processes.

Jordan Hachtel

Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Oak Ridge, TN 37830

Jordan is a Staff Scientist at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He began his microscopy career at ORNL in 2012 while a graduate student in the Department of Physics at Vanderbilt University. After graduating in 2016, he came to ORNL officially as a postdoc, and converted to a staff scientist at ORNL in 2019.

He has always focused on spectroscopy. First with core-loss electron energy-loss spectroscopy in semiconductor gate-stacks, then on the optical properties of complex plasmonic systems with cathodoluminescence spectroscopy. Recently, his work has been centered on ultra-low-loss excitations in monochromated EELS, where he strives to develop advanced experimental and data-analysis techniques and to expand the breadth of applications of monochromated EELS into quantum materials, power electronics, and biology.

Second Year Directors (2024 – 2026)

Megan E. Holtz

Assistant Professor, Metallurgical and Materials Engineering
Colorado School of Mines
Golden, CO
Email: mholtz -at- mines.edu

Megan Holtz is an assistant professor at the Colorado School of Mines, where she develops scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) techniques and grows thin film oxide materials, to understand how local crystal structures at interfaces impacts properties for energy and functional materials. Her prior experience was as an NRC Postdoctoral Associate in the Materials Measurement Laboratory at NIST, and postdoctoral and graduate work at Cornell University. During these appointments she has worked on STEM techniques and oxide molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) to investigate the fundamental properties of ferroelectric and multiferroic interfaces, as well as design materials with properties which bring them closer to device applications. She also developed electrochemical liquid cell STEM measurements to observe battery and fuel cell components operating in situ. She obtained her B.S. degree in Physics from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. She has authored and co-authored 55 papers, 8 of which have received over 100 citations.

Jessica Riesterer

Scientist, CEDAR, OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, School of Medicine
Oregon Health & Science University
Email: riesterj -at- ohsu.edu

Jessica Riesterer is a staff scientist at Oregon Health & Science University studying nanoscale behavior of cancer using electron microscopy. She has been a MAS member since graduate school at the University of Minnesota (20 years!), where she heavily used EDX and EBSD in combination with AFM & FIB-SEM to study traditional ceramics. Since then, Jessica has worked on novel technique, applications, and instrumentation development with respect to a large range of materials in her roles at EMPA-Thun, Switzerland, Idaho National Laboratory, and FEI Company/Thermo Fisher Scientific. Her current interest is to develop microanalysis workflows for the life science community.

First Year Directors (2025 – 2027)

Aurélien Moy

Senior Software Design Engineer
Gatan, Inc.
Email: amoy6 -at- wisc.edu

Aurélien Moy is a Senior Software Design Engineer at Gatan, Inc., where he develops and enhances the EDS/WDS quantification engine for the DigitalMicrograph and APEX software. Previously, he served as a postdoctoral researcher at Concord University, modernizing an old ARL electron microprobe. Aurélien also consulted for Probe Software, Inc., where he was in charge of the maintenance and development of the Probe Image software. Earlier in his career, Aurélien was a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Geoscience Department where he specialized on developing new EPMA methods for quantification using soft X-rays at low accelerating voltages. Aurélien received his engineering degree in Electronics and Applied Physics, with a specialty in Nuclear Engineering, from the National Graduate School of Engineering & Research Center of Caen (ENSICAEN), France in 2011. He earned his PhD in Geoscience/Physics from the University of Montpellier, and the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) research center of Marcoule, in 2014. Aurélien’s thesis received the European Microbeam Analysis Society Thesis Award in 2015 for his work on the measurement of atomic parameters of actinides and the development of standardless quantification methods of actinides by EPMA. After his PhD, he worked at the CEA research center of Cadarache, France, before joining UW-Madison as a Postdoc. Aurélien has been recognized with several awards, including the Young Scientist Award from the European Microbeam Analysis Society in 2013, the Early Career Scholar Award from the International Union of Microbeam Analysis Societies in 2014 and 2017, and the Microanalysis Society Macres Award for best instrumentation/software in 2020.

Debangshu Mukherjee

Staff Scientist
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Email: mukherjeed -at- ornl.gov

Debangshu Mukherjee is a staff scientist (R&D Associate) at the Computational Sciences & Engineering Division (CSED) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He joined ORNL in 2018, initially as a postdoc at the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) followinghis PhD in Materials Science & Engineering at The Pennsylvania State University. His doctoral work focused on applying aberration corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) to quantify ferroelectric distortions. While at ORNL he has worked on extending structural distortion quantifications from STEM to 4D-STEM, where the diffraction space information is utilized too. Dr. Mukherjee has developed the STEMTool Python package to analyze STEM and 4D-STEM datasets, and since becoming a staff scientist has worked both on 4D-STEM and microscope automation. This work lies at the boundary of electron microscopy and computational sciences and utilizes high-performance computing to rapidly analyze streamed STEM data for automated microscopy. Dr. Mukherjee is deeply interested in open-source microscopy software development, and has contributed to several projects in this capacity, and strongly believes that an open data and analysis platform would result in a more equitable microscopy community, where the barriers to data analysis will decrease.