“Working with the students and training them is the most enjoyable part for me. I enjoy helping someone who started and knows nothing – teaching them, encouraging them, working with them, getting to the point where they are doing really great work on the SEM. Seeing that progress, being able to help them obtain good research results which ultimately end up in publications is very enjoyable. The GeminiSEM has been the principal interest and I have a number of students who thank me very much for the help.”

For decades ZEISS FE-SEM has been enabling researchers in facilities where user hands-on SEM experience can vary extremely. Malcolm Thomas has been working in the field of electron microscopy for over 30 years. He shares his endeavors to impart this knowledge to the students and users at Cornell’s CCMR.

“Absolutely. That’s one of the selling points to the whole SEM. You come to use the instrument and you can get really great images, very quickly. It’s really good that way. They find it very easy; the controls are very simple and laid out really well. I have not heard anybody complain the operation is too complicated and all the users definitely enjoy using the GeminiSEM.”

“To be perfectly honest, all the projects that come through are interesting in their own right. The diversity of samples is incredible. One particularly interesting one to me is a project that has since concluded. A MEMS device was failing – It was causing problems at quite a macroscopic scale. Ultimately the source of the problem had to be investigated at the nanometer scale to uncover the root cause. It was fascinating to see how understanding the problem at the microscopic scale translated to a big problem macroscopically.”