Nestor J. Zaluzec received his BS in Physics from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with Prof. H. L. Fraser. He was awarded the prestigious Eugene P. Wigner Fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, after which he joined Argonne National Laboratory, established the Electron Microscopy Center, and became its first Director. Nestor is a Fellow of the MicroAnalysis Society and received the Presidential Science award in 2017. He is also a Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America, Northwestern University (NAISE) and the University of Chicago (CASE) and holds Adjunct appointments at Northern Illinois University and the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Nestor’s microanalytical origins trace back the early 70’s, where as an undergraduate working part-time at the Sherwin Williams Research Center, he designed and built his first instrument, the Spectogoniophotometer. In graduate school, he switched from light to electrons where his research included designing hardware and software for quantitative x-ray microanalysis and an early form of scanning diffraction for TEM/STEM. At ORNL, he interfaced one of the first EDS systems to an HVEM as well as built an aberration-corrected electron spectrometer and associated software. At Argonne, he continued his R&D in both XEDS and EELS, where he built the first CCD detector system for parallel EELS. The now-ubiquitous Plasma Cleaner for EM’s was another of his inventions as well as the Scanning Confocal Electron Microscope and the Pi steradian XEDS detector. Position Resolved Diffraction (now called 4D STEM) using 2D detector arrays, and the TelePresence Microscopy Collaboratory for remote instrument operation is also part of his repertoire.
Nestor is presently a Senior Scientist in the Photon Sciences Directorate at ANL where he continues to work on multi-modal, multi-dimensional hyperspectral imaging and analysis of hard and soft matter applied to both the physical and biological sciences.