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Ondrej L. Krivanek

Ondrej L.
Krivanek

Ondrej L. Krivanek (Photo credit: Nils Lund)

Ondrej Krivanek is a physicist of Czech and British nationality, resident in the United States. Born in Prague, he moved to the UK in the late 1960s where he obtained a degree at the University of Leeds, before moving to Cambridge to work on his PhD in electron microscopy with Archie Howie.

After Cambridge, Krivanek had postdoctoral positions in Kyoto, at Bell Labs and at UC Berkeley. During his time in Berkeley he became interested in electron energy loss spectroscopy and built his own spectrometer. He became an assistant professor and associate director of the NSF HREM Facility at Arizona State University in 1980, and at the same time started collaborating with Gatan Inc., first as a consultant, before moving permanently to the company and becoming its R&D director.

In 1995 he went back to Cambridge with a grant from the Royal Society to work with Mick Brown and Andrew Bleloch on aberration correction of electron lenses. His advances enabled him and Niklas Dellby to start Nion Co. in 1997, a company of which he is still president. With Niklas Dellby and IBM’s Phil Batson, he obtained sub-ångström resolution with a scanning transmission electron microscope, with the results published in 2002.

Ondrej Krivanek is one of the major experts in electron microscopy and electron energy loss spectroscopy. He has received a number of awards, including the Duddell Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics, and the Cosslett Medal from the International Federation of Microscopy Societies. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Institute of Physics, the Microscopy Society of America, and of the American Physical Society, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society.

Life story: Ondrej Krivanek

Cover of the March 25, 2010 issue of Nature. It shows a medium angle annular dark field (MAADF) STEM image of monolayer BN with atomic substitutions. The experimental image was colorized to correspond to the types of atoms that were identified using image intensities, and rendered in a perspective view.

Ondrej Krivanek and George Corbin in front of Nion I building, which featured a large garage that we later converted into a mechanical assembly room. Nion can therefore claim that its origins were in the proverbial garage.

Read the life story of Kavli Prize Laureate Ondrej Krivanek in his own words:

Random Encounters Sometimes Push You in the Right Directions

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