“We have a variety of researchers with different backgrounds in chemistry, physics, bioengineering, plant and microbiology. If they want to physically view something, I work with them. The most exciting aspect is that everyone is always researching something new. When you’re helping somebody out, they’re always doing something different that will contribute to science. Someone might work with plant fibers one day and with platinum nanoparticles on carbon another day.”

For decades ZEISS FE-SEM has been enabling researchers in facilities where new users need to hit the ground running. Kennedy Nguyen has been the IMF Manager for three years. He discusses different research projects and how quickly his students get up to speed on imaging with their GeminiSEM.

“For a lot of researchers and users I’ve trained, after the first few times using the microscope, it’s like driving their car or riding their bike. Personally, I like the auto brightness and contrast; you can adjust resolution easily and there’s basically only two alignments – wobble and stigmatism. It’s convenient."

“It’s difficult because there’s so many different projects. I can give a few examples. There’s research on gold nanoparticles in liquid crystals. They image the liquid crystal gold particles which are broken up in shells. Liquid crystal is hard to image but they’re able to image it in our SEM when it forms spheres. Imaging of protein fibers has also been very interesting. The fibers are 10 – 20 nm in thickness and roughly 50 – 100 nm long. They can see the different fibers in the SEM and when they bring it to our TEM, they see similarities in the structure.”

"Most of the time they’re looking at carbon nanotubes or small structures. Mostly hard gold, platinum, lots of materials samples. Our users look at biological samples too. We operate the SEM at 3 kV or lower almost all of the time for more surface information.”