Prof. Ondrej Krivanek

Ondrej Krivanek was born in Prague, Czech Republic, and he obtained his B.Sc. and Ph.D. in Physics in the UK, from the Universities of Leeds and Cambridge, respectively. He worked as a post-doc at Kyoto University, Bell Labs and UC Berkeley, and then as professor of physics at Arizona State University (ASU), Director of Research at Gatan, and visiting scholar at U. of Cambridge. In 1997, he co-founded Nion Co. and has since been Nion’s President, as well as Affiliate Professor at ASU.

At the beginning of his career, Ondrej pioneered imaging semiconductor devices by high resolution electron microscopy, and he obtained the first lattice resolution images of the iconic Si-SiO2 interface in MOSFETs.   He then developed (and later co-developed) a number of instruments for electron microscopy and spectroscopy, such as electron energy loss spectrometers and imaging filters, CCD cameras, and imaging and spectroscopy software.

Ondrej and his team are best known for developing the first successful corrector for the scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM), which enabled the STEM to reach sub-Å resolution for the first time, and then going on to design a new STEM that can analyze matter atom-by-atom.   More recently, they have designed a monochromator that has allowed vibrational spectra to be observed in the STEM.

Ondrej enjoys applying the instruments he designed to important problems in materials science and physics, typically in collaboration with the users of the instruments. He was elected Fellow of UK’s Royal Society in 2010, and his work has been honored by the Seto Prize of the Japanese Microscopy Society, the Dudell Prize of the British Institute of Physics, the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Microscopy Society of America, and the Cosslett Medal of the International Federation of Societies for Microscopy.