2014 Ondrej Krivanek

Ondrej Krivanek graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from Leeds University and a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, both in the UK. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Kyoto University, Bell Laboratories and the University of California at Berkeley, assistant professor of Physics at Arizona State University, director of research at Gatan, visiting professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, CNRS Orsay and Cambridge University, and research professor at University of Washington. In 1997, he co-founded Nion Company near Seattle in Washington State. He has since been Nion’s president and more recently also adjunct professor of physics at Arizona State University.

During his post-doc at Berkeley, Ondrej found that he liked thinking up, designing, making and then using pioneering new instruments more than working with existing ones, and later on that instrument development can often be done more effectively in a small company setting than in academia. Instruments whose design he originated, such as Gatan’s electron energy loss spectrometers and imaing fiters, CCD cameras and DigitalMicrograph sofware, and more recently electron-optical aberration correctors and Nion’s whole electron microscopes and monochromators, can be found in many laboratories around the world, and they have helped to produce many scientific advances. The Nion microscopes in particular have been able to explore matter in unprecedented detail, including, very recently, performing phonon spectroscopy and spectrum-imaging in an electron microscope.

Ondrej has published over 240 papers and book chapters, with over 6000 citations. His work has been honored by an R&D 100 award, the Seto Prize of the Japanese Microscopy Society, the Duddell Prize of the Institute of Physics, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Microscopy Society of America, an Honorary Fellowship in the Royal Microscopical Society, and an election to the British Royal Society.