EPSRC National Research Facility for Advanced Electron Microscopy
Celebrating 20 years
20 years of Advanced Electron Microscopy at SuperSTEM
The 13th of December 2022 marks the 20th anniversary of the official inauguration of SuperSTEM.
The SuperSTEM project began in 1997 when Prof. Mick Brown presented a now seminal paper presented at the 1997 Electron Microscopy and Analysis Group (EMAG) conference in Cambridge. Prof. Brown urged the UK scientific community to pool resources in a national microscopy centre that would offer access to an emerging new technological development called aberration correction, which promised to “put a synchrotron in a microscope”.
To realise this vision he teamed up with Peter Goodhew and Chris Kiely from the University of Liverpool, Rik Brydson at the University of Leeds, Alan Craven at the University of Glasgow and Andrew Bleloch from Cambridge to bid for funding for a "UK SuperSTEM National Facility", which was later to become the EPSRC National Research Facility (NRF) for Advanced Electron Microscopy.
SuperSTEM is the EPSRC National Research Facility for Advanced Electron Microscopy.
We support a wide variety of multi-disciplinary research by providing access to:
cutting-edge instrumentation
state-of-the-art data analysis
expertise and training in advanced electron microscopy.
Access to SuperSTEM is open to academics within the world-wide scientific community. Commercial and proprietary research access is welcome, subject to funding.
Our own research or research carried out in collaboration with other institutions ranges from fields as diverse as metallurgy, photovoltaic semi-conductors, thermoelectric oxides, catalysis for clear air technology, soft matter as well as microscopy instrumentation and technique development. See a collection of case studies and a description of some of our on-going projects for an insight into the diversity of research areas supported by SuperSTEM.
The principal location of the facility is a purpose-built low-vibration laboratory on the SciTech Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus. The facility is embedded within the UK academic community through a consortium of universities, led by the University of Leeds and joined by the Universities of Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford and York.
