BYLINE: Andre Salles
The award spotlights important scientific or technical accomplishments made at (or beneficial to) the APS.
Lin Gao, a postdoctoral researcher in the Nuclear Science and Engineering division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory, is the recipient of the 2025 Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award.
The award is given annually by the user organization of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne. It recognizes important scientific or technical accomplishments made at (or beneficial to) the APS by a young scientist. The award is named after Rosalind Franklin, a chemist who played a critical — but largely unacknowledged — role in the discovery of the structure of DNA.
“It has been an incredible experience at the APS, where I have had the privilege of using state-of-the-art characterization techniques and collaborating with many exceptional scientists.” — Lin Gao, Argonne National Laboratory
Gao received the award for his work in additive manufacturing, specifically his research on wire-feed laser directed energy deposition processes. For this work, Gao used the APS to study laser-melted additive manufacturing as it happened, revealing the intricate effects of wire melting states on the microstructure of a particular material as it solidified. The insights gained through this experiment have implications for industries reliant on large-scale metallic parts, such as those found in the nuclear and aerospace sectors.
Gao’s work was published in the International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture in January 2024.
Gao was nominated for the award by APS beamline scientist Andrew Chuang, who had this to say: “Dr. Gao exemplifies the qualities of a rising young investigator. His collaborative spirit and ability to communicate complex scientific concepts have made him a valuable mentor to graduate students and a respected colleague among his peers. His dedication to advancing both science and practical applications aligns perfectly with the spirit of the Rosalind Franklin Young Investigator Award.”
Gao received his doctorate in materials science at the University of Virginia. He will give a talk as part of the APS and Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) Users Meeting on Monday, May 5. CNM is another DOE Office of Science user facility at Argonne.
“It has been an incredible experience at the APS, where I have had the privilege of using state-of-the-art characterization techniques and collaborating with many exceptional scientists,” Gao said. “At the APS, synchrotron techniques are employed to bridge critical knowledge gaps across various fields, and the complex scientific challenges we encounter, in turn, drive the ongoing advancement of synchrotron techniques.”
“Through this experience, I have come to realize that posing a compelling scientific question and fully understanding the potential of our tools are equally crucial,” Gao added. “This insight has not only shaped my research at the APS but has also profoundly influenced my broader research philosophy.”
About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials
The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.
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