Former Graduate Students

of Adam Brooks Adam Brooks
Student of Les Butler

Adam Brooks received his PhD from LSU in 2017 after working as a chemistry graduate student in Les Butler's imaging research group. He accepted a position as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Buffalo Manufacturing Works operated by EWI. Adam received a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry degree from Syracuse University in 2012 and chose to pursue a degree of Doctor of Philosophy at a school in a warmer climate (LSU). His work currently focuses on X-ray and neutron grating-based interferometry of lithium ion batteries. He presented work on battery diffraction and principle component analysis at the 10th World Conference on Neutron Radiography in Grindelwald, Switzerland (2014) and at the 2nd International Conference on Tomography of Materials and Structures in Quebec City, Canada (2015). Adam is an enthusiast of skiing, college basketball, and traveling the world.

Sourav Chatterjee
Student of Evgueni Nesterov

Sourav Chatterjee earned his PhD in Chemistry from Louisiana State University. He worked on developing methods to prepare surface-immobilized thin films consisting of periodically alternating covalently interconnected sublayers of semiconducting and insulating polymers. Such films will be used in neutron scattering studies to investigate how weak intermolecular forces determine the alignment and organization in the polymer films, as well as in designing the ways to control interlayer separation to tune the properties of these films for particular practical applications.

of Zhenyu Diao Zhenyu Diao
Student of Rongying Jin

Zhenyu Diao received his PhD in Physics at Louisiana State University. He joined the LaCNS project in Aug. 2014. His major responsibility is developing new materials that exhibit interesting physical properties, and to grow single crystals for neutron scattering measurements. At present his research is focused on BaMn_2-xFe_xSb₂ series. According to theoretical calculations, both end compounds BaMn₂Sb₂ and BaFe₂Sb₂ should have magnetically ordered ground states. Our goal is to map out the phase diagram of BaMn_2-xFe_xSb₂. So far, Zhenyu has grown sizable (5 mm x 5 mm surface area) BaMn₂Sb₂ single crystals.

Pu Du
Student of Revati Kumar

Pu Du is a chemistry PhD student at Louisiana State University. His research focus is the computational study of novel polymer systems, specifically polypeptoids. Charged polypeptoids are synthetic pseudopeptides, similar to polypeptides, but lacking sterogenic centers. They show great potential in biomedical applications such as drug delivery. Pu uses computational tools to investigate the effect of charge-charge interactions on the structure and dynamics of polyelectrolytes. This involves both atomistic and coarse-grained simulations to study the polymer chain, micelle formation as well as aggregation in aqueous solutions.

In Chul Hwang
Student of Steve Rick

In Chul is pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at the University of New Orleans. His research involves carrying out simulations of avariety of peptoids and analyzing the results to determine which factors promote aggregation versus solubility.

Peter Kei Peter (Chunwa) Kei
Student of Evgueni Nesterov

B.S. Chemistry, Bridgewater State University
Peter develops new synthetic approaches for the preparation of fluorescent organic core-shell nanoparticles and works to expand our understanding of energy transfer in these types of systems. These polymer dots contain a central fluorescent near-infrared core covalently bound to a conjugated polymer shell and show strong intra-particle excitation energy transfer. Characterization of these hierarchically built systems by means of neutron scattering will afford information about how structural organization is affected by the preparation conditions and its influence on the photophysical properties of these particles, while providing valuable information about energy transfer that can help develop better functioning optoelectronic materials.

Mojammel Khan
Student of David Young

Mojammel received his PhD in Physics from Louisiana State University in December 2017. He recently accepted a postdoctoral position at Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago, IL.

Ang Li Ang Li
Student of Donghui Zhang

Ang received his PhD in Chemistry from Louisiana State University. His research includes synthesizing and characterizing a cyclic polypeptoid bearing a zwitterionic end-group to be used for the study of solution clustering of cyclic polypeptoids by SANS and MD simulation.

Jinyu Liu
Student of Zhiqiang Mao

B.S. Physics, University of Science and Technology of China. Jinyu Liu was in Prof. Mao’s group at Tulane University and received his PhD in August 2017. He recently accepted a postodoctoral research position at UCLA. His research focuses on searching for new materials displaying exotic quantum phenomena including superconductivity and Dirac fermions. He has been growing various types of single crystals using flux method and Chemical Vapor Transport (CVT) method and doing transport and magnetic measurements on them using PPMS and MPMS3. His research has been productive and succeeded in making high quality single crystals of several materials systems. His future plan is to integrate neutron scattering measurements with his current efforts in material synthesis and characterization. He was selected to attend the 17th National School on Neutron and x-ray Scattering.

Zhaoyuan Liu
Student of Donghui Zhang

Zhaoyuan investigates the effect of charge-charge interaction on the aggregate structure and dynamics of well-defined conjugated polyelectrolytes. He has been synthesizing conjugated polyelectrolytes with tunable charge density and will investigate their solution morphologies (Direction 2). He also prepares amphiphilic polypeptoids containing hydrophobic side chains to study the effect of hydrophobic interaction on morphological transition of lipid assemblies (Direction 3).

Olasehinde Owoseni
Student of Vijay John

Olasehinde received his PhD in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Tulane University in 2016. He received a number of awards including Distinguished Graduate Student from Tulane University and Graduate Student Award (2nd place) from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. His research focused on microstructural characteristics of surfactant assembly for oil spill dispersant applications. He currently works with Intel Corporation.

Chun-Han Wang
Student of Evgueni Nesterov

Chun-Han is a PhD student in the Chemistry Department at Louisiana State University. He has participated in photophysical experiments on chromophoric
systems for energy transfer in micellar systems, as well as in hierarchically built conjugated polymer systems.

Zi Wang Zi Wang
Student of James Spivey

Zi is a PhD candidate in Chemical Engineering at Louisiana State University. His research involves synthesizing catalyst powder samples and initiating reactions at the SNS.

Sunting Xuan
Student of Donghui Zhang

Sunting is pursuing a PhD in Chemistry at Louisiana State University. Sunting’s research focus is synthesizing and characterizing hydrophobically modified polypeptoids (HMPs) to be used in the SANS study of interactions and structural evolution of liposome with HMPs.

of Raghuvara Yendluri Raghuvara Yendluri
Student of Yuri Lvov

Raghuvara Yendluri is currently pursuing his PhD at Louisiana Tech University under the guidance of Dr. Yuri Lvov. He holds a master’s degree in molecular sciences and nanotechnology.

San Gil Youm
Student of Evgueni Nesterov

San Gil Youm received his PhD from the LSU Chemistry Department. He worked on the design and preparation of selectively deuterated stratified thin films of conjugated polymers by surface-confined polymerization. These thin-film samples will be used to develop neutron reflectometry based methods to study local structure and organization in thin films of conjugate polymers as well as the influence of weak intermolecular interactions on the organization and morphology of the films.

Jennifer Zehner
Student of Gerald Schneider

Jennifer joined the PhD program in Physics at Louisiana State University in spring 2017. She assisted Dr. Schneider with the soft matter experiment laboratory and performed NMR experiments in Darmstadt, Germany.

Yuheng Zhang Yueheng Zhang
Student of Vijay John

Yueheng received his PhD in 2018 from the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at Tulane University. He attended Tianjin University for his undergraduate studies. He recently accepted a position at Biogen Corporation.