LASSP/AEP Seminar: Rhonda Stroud (Arizona State)

The Universe is my Nano-Fab: An Electron Microscopist’s Guide to the Diversity of Astro-Nanomaterials

Many materials of recent technological interest including nanodiamond, graphene, and SiC, were first produced in the outflows of ancient stars older than our Sun and at the edges of our of nascent solar system. Although we often think of nanoscience and technology as emerging in the late 1900s, nature has been producing such materials for billions of years, through a wide range of astrophysical processes, from condensation of dust particles in circumstellar envelopes to space weathering on airless bodies. The principles of physics and chemistry that constrain materials formation are the same in space as they are on Earth, although the relevant temperatures, pressures and time scales are often quite different. This seminar will discuss the use of state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopy to investigate the compositions and structures of astro-nanomaterials, including doped nanodiamonds, in order to constrain their astrophysical formation and processing histories, and to potentially aid in development of novel synthetic nanomaterials.

Bio:
Rhonda Stroud joined Arizona State University in 2022 as the director of the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies. Her current research focuses on laboratory analyses of astromaterials to determine how materials in the Solar System have formed and evolved from the initial formation of the nebula to modern day. She is recognized for her leadership in the application of electron microscopy and focused ion beam methods to the study of presolar stardust, and returned comet, asteroid, and interstellar dust samples. Asteroid 8468Rhondastroud is named in her honor by the International Astronomical Union.

She received her doctorate in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996 for research on the phase stability of TiZrNi quasicrystals and subsequently joined the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) as an NRC Postdoctoral Fellow to study the effects of atomic disorder on colossal magnetoresistive oxides. She became a Research Physicist at NRL in 1998, serving as Head of the Nanoscale Materials Section of the Materials Science and Technology Division from 2007-2022. Her NRL research portfolio combined ONR funded microscopy of novel materials for optical, electronic and energy applications with NASA-sponsored research on meteorites and returned samples.

Stroud has served in several leadership and subject matter expert roles for NASA, DOE, DoD, the National Academies, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Meteoritical Society, the Microscopy Society of America and the Microanalysis Society. She was a member of the Small Bodies committee of the 2023-2032 NASA Planetary Science Decadal Survey, a member of the NASA Planetary Science Advisory Committee (2018-2020), and the President of the Microanalysis Society (2018-2020).