Dr. Joel Brock, CHESS Director, received his B.S. in Physics with Departmental Honors from Stanford University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987. He joined the faculty of Cornell University’s School of Applied & Engineering Physics in 1989, where he served as Director from 2000 to 2007.
For the latest information on this event, please check out the:
Updates from CHESS:
CHESS leadership, along with program directors and staff, will provide updates on the latest developments within the lab and its surrounding ecosystem.
User Science Talks:
We are extending invitations to experts from diverse scientific domains to share insights into their research endeavors and explain CHESS's role in their respective fields.
CHESS Student Paper Award
Austenitic stainless steels combine high strength and toughness, making them useful for automotive applications. These steels can undergo a crystallographic phase transformation from austenite to martensite, triggered either through cooling below the martensitic start temperature or by mechanical deformation. This martensitic transformation (MT) impacts the material’s mechanical performance.
In most crystals, atoms line up in neat, repeating patterns where every bond and every magnetic moment fall into place. The structure is stable, the magnetism is ordered, and the system rests in balance. But researchers studying a new family of materials called LnCd₃P₃ found something very different. Inside this material, some bonds between atoms become slightly shorter or longer than others, and the triangular geometry of the lattice prevents them from forming an orderly pattern.
What happens when you squeeze DNA? Can pressure reveal something about how our genetic material is packed, protected, and accessed?
Dr. Kushol Gupta, a structural biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is pursuing this question and found that turning up the pressure might be one of the best ways to peek into how life organizes itself at the atomic scale.