Professor Yu-Sheng Chen welcomed Assistant Professor Natalia Gonzalez-Pech and her student, rising sophomore Nicholas Figueroa, from the Department of Chemistry at Hope College, an all-undergraduate institution in Holland, Michigan. Figueroa spent six weeks at the beamline; Gonzalez-Pech visited periodically as her schedule permitted. The following is a lightly edited transcript of an interview conducted at the midpoint of their research.
From left to right: Tieyan Chang, Ying-Ping Chen, Xiaotong Zhang, Natalia Gonzalez-Pech, Nicholas Figueroa and Yu-Sheng Chen
Gonzalez-Pech and Figueroa worked on two projects: using powder X-ray diffraction to discover the orientation packing of clusters of nanoparticles that we previously synthesized, and completing single crystal X-ray diffraction for some molecules from a collaborator that may be used in the future as precursors.
* The interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.