ORNL's Pennycook named Materials Research Society Fellow

Stephen Pennycook of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been elected to the class of 2011 fellows of the Materials Research Society.

MRS fellows are recognized for their distinguished research accomplishments and their outstanding contributions to the worldwide advancement of materials research. Pennycook and the rest of the 2011 fellows will be recognized at an awards ceremony at the MRS spring meeting in April.

Pennycook was cited for "pioneering contributions to the development of the Z-contrast technique for incoherent imaging of materials at atomic resolution and leadership in developing sub-Angstrom resolution aberration-corrected electron microscopy."

His work with the Z-contrast technique led Pennycook and his colleagues to obtain the first images that distinguish individual light atoms such as boron, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen.

Pennycook has worked at ORNL since 1982 and leads the Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy group in ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division.

A recipient of numerous honors including an R&D 100 award, Pennycook is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Physical Society, the Microscopy Society of America, the Institute of Physics (UK) and a UT-Battelle corporate fellow.

Provided by Oak Ridge National Laboratory