Expert Interview: Ashfia Huq

[00:00:08] John German: Hi everyone. This is John German with Berkeley Lab Strategic Communications team. I’m here today with Ashfia Huq, who joined Berkeley Lab in March as director of the Molecular Foundry. Ashfia, thank you for taking the time to talk with us about the Foundry and its mission.

[00:00:23] Ashfia Huq: Thank you, John. It’s great to be here.

[00:00:25] John German: For those who are unfamiliar with the Foundry, can you tell us what its specialty is and how it supports the nation’s science?

[00:00:32] Ashfia Huq: Well, the Foundry is one of five knowledge-based user facilities that provides state-of-the-art, multidisciplinary expertise, methods, and instrumentation in nanoscale science.

Now, you might ask, what is a user facility? Well, user facilities are federally funded facilities that are open to external users who can come use it for free, provided the research is non-proprietary. Now, at the Molecular Foundry, each year we host over a thousand users who walk in through our doors. They are often very early career scientists, like graduate students and postdocs.

Who are enlisting the help of our scientific staff who are experts in nanoscale science, like synthesis of nano materials, characterization of nano materials, and also help students, and postdocs, and other staff from universities, national labs, and even industry who can come and try to solve their own research problem with the help of our scientists.

So that is, essentially, the mission of the molecular Foundry.

[00:01:40] John German: Can you help us understand what’s different at the nanoscale? What is nanoscience and how does it differ from other ways of understanding materials and chemistry?

[00:01:48] Ashfia Huq: So, in order for me to explain that, I think I’m going to go back a little bit in history.

In the early 1900s, there was a scientific revolution, mostly involving physicists, called the Quantum Science Revolution. This is when scientists realized that when you get smaller and smaller and smaller the laws of classical physics completely fail. You start seeing all these new phenomena. So, if you want to develop material with known properties, or you are going to target a property, you need to understand materials at a very, very small atomic or molecular scale.

This is essentially the field of nanoscience, which is cross-disciplinary science, which involves material science, chemistry, biology, anything that comes in very, very small. So, if you’re wondering what is nano, well physicists say it’s 10 to the power minus nine, which might not make much sense to you, but what it is it’s so small that our visible range that we look at things, which is the light, the wavelength of light, goes from 380 nanometers to 780 nanometers.

We’re working in scales of tens of nanometers, so they’re so small that you cannot look at it with light. So, in order for us to understand these materials and how to make these materials or characterize these materials, we need special tools and special methodology, which is what we develop at the nano centers.

[00:03:18] John German: Well, what are some of the capabilities of the foundry that many people might not know about?

[00:03:22] Ashfia Huq: So, as I already mentioned, Foundry staff are working on a very versatile set of things which ranges anywhere between, biotechnology, to microelectronics, to quantum science, and quantum information systems.

And because of that we have a lot of different types of characterization tools and synthesis tools. So, we have robotics in the bioorganic and inorganic centers, which help us accelerate materials discovery. So, in the past we used to walk in the lab and make one material per day, but that actually is a very slow process.

So our scientists are trying to accelerate that process by using modern technologies and robotics, AI/ML, where they can look at the much larger sample to see what synthesis works and what doesn’t. And then we also have to know what we have made. In order to do that, we use various different techniques like X-ray scattering, nuclear magnetic resonance like NMR, XPS, all these three character soups of characterization techniques that we house in the foundry that tells us with exquisite detail of how these materials are forming and working in their native condition.

[00:04:36] John German: Thank you. So, what are some examples of research that has benefited from the Foundry’s capabilities and expertise over the years?

[00:04:43] Ashfia Huq: So, the staff in the Foundry are always pushing the boundaries of what can be done, right? So, you know, the users and the folks who are coming through usually have some targeted research that they want to do.

But what we are trying to do is say, “what can we do now and what would we need to study the next generation of materials?” So, developing new tools is actually one of the things that Foundry is very well known for. And one of those examples is transmission electron aberration corrected microscope. It’s a bit of a mouthful, so we call it TEAM so it’s easy to remember. So the TEAM microscope was developed as a DOE Department of Energy funded project, which involved multiple national labs and their nano centers who also do microscopy. Now this microscope has pushed the boundary of what you can see in a material to the atomic level. So you can actually see an atom with this microscope, which is really, really fascinating.

And this development came as a result of the work that was done at some of these nano centers that are funded by Department of Energy. The other thing that happened from the same development was we actually had to develop a detector because the detector technology that existed before TEAM came along was not sufficient to get us to that atomic resolution.

This detector technology opened up a whole new field in microscopy called cryo-microscopy, which basically allows you to cool down the sample to the point where now you can look at soft and biological materials, otherwise the beam damage was too hard to deal with for biological systems, and this is known as the cryo-microscopy and was a Nobel Prize winning technology that, some of the earlier developments started at the Foundry and they are an, in fact ,mentioned in the Nobel, description of the project.

[00:06:41] John German: Wow. So, you recently joined Berkeley lab in March as the director of the Foundry.

What brought you here at this stage of your career and what gets you excited about the research at the Foundry?

[00:06:51] Ashfia Huq: So, I have actually spent most of my scientific career at National Labs. I started out as an undergraduate student walking into Brookhaven National Lab, and I was so fascinated by this big science and experiments that I got hooked.

I’ve moved around in various different national labs from all the way from my PhD at Brookhaven to working as staff and postdoc at other National labs. What brought me to Berkeley is its reputation in doing science. It is one of the really well-known Office of Science National Lab where fundamental science is being done.

So, when I heard about this opportunity I absolutely jumped over it, and I am very happy to be here leading the Molecular Foundry.

[00:07:40] John German: Ashfia, thank you for taking the time to tell us about the important research at the Molecular Foundry.

[00:07:45] Ashfia Huq: John, you’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

[00:07:49] John German: About the Molecular Foundry, visit foundry.lbl.gov. This is John German with a strategic communications team at Berkeley Lab.