Community, Education, Outreach - Summer 2025 newsletter
Since midsummer 2024, the CharFac has maintained a robust program of outreach and engagement by organizing and/or participating in a range of scientific events as follows:
The CharFac multifariously participated in IPRIME events -- both the Annual Meeting (May) and the Midyear Workshop (January) -- with a mix of talks, posters and guided tours of the CharFac. It supported STEM education through involvement in the ASM Materials Camp, an event organized by ASM and the Chemical Engineering and Materials Science department every summer. In August 2024, the CharFac held its Academic User Meeting, a half-day event where the University user community gathers to discuss possibilities while (i) hearing scientific talks from featured users and (ii) conversing at the posters of staff scientists. CharFac will be holding this recurring event each August.
Regarding on-campus and local events held by external entities, CharFac has had exhibits at the Biointerface Workshop, the Advanced Manufacturing conference, the Minnesota Microscopy Society Annual Meeting, and the Design of Medical Devices conference. CharFac scientists also have presented their work at international institutions (University Complutense of Madrid and Materials Science Institute of Madrid); at US-based international conferences such as the Materials Research Society's Fall Meeting (Boston) and SPMConnect (Austin, TX; see CharFac co-authored article in Microscopy and Analysis); and in IPRIME-member corporate seminars (3M, Boston Scientific). Starting in March 2025, the CharFac launched a new batch of analytical seminars where our scientists discuss instrumentation and techniques. The first three seminars were “A multimodal approach to surface profilometry” ,“Pushing EBSD to the limits”, and "CharFac's New Confocal Raman: Horiba LabRAM Odyssey". These bi-monthly events aim to further expand knowledge sharing across techniques and enhance community amongst users and CharFac staff members. Finally, CharFac organized a workshop on Multimodal Super-resolution Infrared Spectroscopy, together with Photothermal Spectroscopy Corporation (PSC). The event included expert talks and demos of both optical-profilometry based (PSC's instrument) and AFM-based (CharFac's AFM-IR instrument) capabilities.