Dr Laura Niermann announced as winner of the RMS Alan Agar Award for Electron Microscopy.

We are very pleased to announce Dr Laura Niermann as the winner of the RMS Alan Agar Award for Electron Microscopy.

As an independent early-career researcher at the Technische Universität Berlin, Laura is a central figure in the emerging field of computational microscopy. She has made significant contributions to the research areas of dynamical diffraction and 4D-STEM, specifically regarding the reconstruction of 3D strain fields.

Laura’s research addresses a key challenge in electron microscopy: extracting depth-resolved strain information. So far, information along the beam direction has been inaccessible due to the tensorial nature of
the strain field. She has established that this information is encoded in dynamical diffraction data, and that 3D strain fields can therefore be investigated from 4D-STEM datasets acquired from a single orientation
of the specimen.

In her latest work, Laura achieved a major breakthrough by demonstrating the reconstruction of a strain field along the beam direction. She accomplished this by the numerical inversion of strain-induced dynamical
diffraction effects from experimental data.

To further advance her research, the German Research Foundation (DFG) recently awarded her funding to establish her own Emmy Noether Junior Research Group.