Naomi Shauna Ginsberg (born 1979) is a Canadian electrical engineer, physicist, and scientist. She is currently an associate professor of chemistry at the

University of California The University of California (UC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university, research university system in the U.S. state of California. Headquartered in Oakland, California, Oakland, the system is co ...

, Berkeley.

Life and education

Ginsberg was born in

Halifax, Nova Scotia Halifax is the capital and most populous municipality of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Nova Scotia, and the most populous municipality in Atlantic Canada. As of 2024, it is estimated that the population of the H ...

. She earned her B.Sc. in engineering at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

in 2000, and completed her PhD in physics at

Harvard Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher lear ...

. Her initial interest was biomedicine, but she graduated with an electrical engineering focus, and an emphasis on physics and optics. Accepted into Harvard, and while working in the research group of physics professor

Lene Hau Lene Vestergaard Hau (; born November 13, 1959) is a Danish physicist and educator. She is the Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics at Harvard University. In 1999, she led a Harvard University team who, by use of a Bose–E ...

, Ginsberg studied

Bose–Einstein condensates Bose–Einstein may refer to: * Bose–Einstein condensate, a phase of matter in quantum mechanics ** Bose–Einstein condensation (network theory), the application of this model in network theory ** Bose–Einstein condensation of polaritons ** B ...

, ultracold clouds of atoms that exist at temperatures just a few billionths of a degree above

absolute zero Absolute zero is the lowest possible temperature, a state at which a system's internal energy, and in ideal cases entropy, reach their minimum values. The absolute zero is defined as 0 K on the Kelvin scale, equivalent to −273.15 ° ...

. After being awarded her PhD for her thesis entitled "Manipulations with spatially compressed slow light pulses in Bose–Einstein condensates" with

as her thesis advisor, Ginsberg chose to change direction and include other interests, moving to Berkeley to begin her postdoctoral research in 2007 with

Graham Fleming Graham R. Fleming is a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and member of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute based at UCB. Fleming's team is known for developing and using techniques in advanced multidimensiona ...

as her advisor. She held a

Glenn T. Seaborg Glenn Theodore Seaborg ( ; April 19, 1912February 25, 1999) was an American chemist whose involvement in the synthesis, discovery and investigation of ten transuranium elements earned him a share of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His work i ...

Postdoctoral Fellowship at

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...

, until her appointment as an assistant professor in the chemistry department at UC Berkeley in 2010.

Work

In a series of experiments the Hau Group at Harvard (which included Ginsberg) halted and stored a light signal in a condensate of sodium atoms, then transferred the signal into a second sodium cloud 160

μm The micrometre (Commonwealth English as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; SI symbol: μm) or micrometer (American English), also commonly known by the non-SI term micron, is a unit of length in the International System ...

away. The

American Institute of Physics The American Institute of Physics (AIP) promotes science and the profession of physics, publishes physics journals, and produces publications for scientific and engineering societies. The AIP is made up of various member societies. Its corpora ...

listed this feat as #1 in its Top Ten discoveries of 2007. Ginsberg was the lead author on the paper "Coherent control of optical information with matter wave dynamics", that appeared on the cover of Nature in February of that year. She now leads the Ginsberg Group, whose research objective is "to spatially resolve the complex dynamics of nanoscale processes such as

photosynthetic Photosynthesis ( ) is a Biological system, system of biological processes by which Photoautotrophism, photosynthetic organisms, such as most plants, algae, and cyanobacteria, convert light energy, typically from sunlight, into the chemical ener ...

light harvesting." Her current work is centered on "pushing the limits of spatially resolved spectroscopy and time resolved microscopy in multiple modalities", in order to try to answer fundamental and challenging questions that span chemistry, physics, and biology. Ginsberg's group uses multiple approaches, including

ultrafast spectroscopy In optics, an ultrashort pulse, also known as an ultrafast event, is an electromagnetic pulse whose time duration is of the order of a picosecond (10−12 second) or less. Such pulses have a broadband optical spectrum, and can be created by ...

light microscopy Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view subjects too small to be seen with the naked eye (objects that are not within the resolution range of the normal eye). There are three well-known branches of microscopy: optical, el ...

, and cathodoluminescence electron microscopy.

Awards

In 2011, Ginsberg was awarded the

David and Lucile Packard Foundation The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. It was created in 1964 by David Packard (co-founder of HP) and his wife Lucile Salter Packard. Following David Packard's dea ...

Fellowship for Science and Engineering. In 2012, Her research attracted support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a research and development agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Originally known as the Adva ...

in the form of a Young Faculty Award for her work in "Predictive Materials Science; "Beneath the Bulk: Domain-Specific Efficiency and Degradation in Organic Photovoltaic Thin Films"" Ginsberg currently holds The Cupola Era Endowed Chair in the college of chemistry, and is a faculty scientist in the physical biosciences division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In 2015, Ginsberg was awarded a

Sloan Research Fellowship The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This program is one of the oldest of its kind in the United States. ...

. In 2021, Ginsberg was named a

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics. The following lists are divided chronologically by the year of designation. * List of fellows of the ...

(APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Chemical Physics, "for the innovative development of spatiotemporally resolved imaging and spectroscopy methods, and for their use in elucidating energy transport in hierarchical and heterogeneous materials, as well as in the formation and transformation of said materials".

Publications

*J. A. Tan, J. T. Dull, S. E. Zeltmann, J. A. Tulyagankhodjaev, A. Liebman-Peláez, B. D. Folie, S. A. Dönges, O. Khatib, J. G. Raybin, T. D. Roberts, L. M. Hamerlynck, C. P. N. Tanner, J. Lee, C. Ophus, K. C. Bustillo, M. B. Raschke, H. Ohldag, A. M. Minor, B. P. Rand, N. S. Ginsberg, "Multimodal characterization of crystal structure and formation in rubrene thin films reveals erasure of orientational discontinuities,
''Adv. Funct. Mater.'', 2207867 (2023)
*Folie, B. D., Haber, J. B., Refaely-Abramson, S., Neaton, J. B., & Ginsberg, N. S. "Long-lived correlated triplet pairs in a π-stacked crystalline pentacene derivative.
''Journal of the American Chemical Society'' 140.6 (2018): 2326-2335.
*Bischak, C. G., Wong, A. B., Lin, E., Limmer, D. T., Yang, P., & Ginsberg, N. S. "Tunable polaron distortions control the extent of halide demixing in lead halide perovskites.
''The journal of physical chemistry letters'' 9.14 (2018): 3998-4005.
*Bischak, C. G., Hetherington, C. L., Wu, H., Aloni, S., Ogletree, D. F., Limmer, D. T., & Ginsberg, N. S. "Origin of reversible photoinduced phase separation in hybrid perovskites.
''Nano letters'' 17.2 (2017): 1028-1033.
*Dou, L., Wong, A. B., Yu, Y., Lai, M., Kornienko, N., Eaton, S. W., ... & Yang, P. "Atomically thin two-dimensional organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites.
''Science'' 349.6255 (2015): 1518-1521
*G. S. Schlau-Cohen, A. Ishizaki, T. R. Calhoun, N. S. Ginsberg, M. Ballottari, R. Bassi, and G. R. Fleming. "Elucidation of the timescales and origins of quantum electronic coherence in LHCII", ''Nature Chemistry'', 4, 389 (2012). *N. S. Ginsberg, J. D. Davis, M. Ballottari, Y.-C. Cheng, R. Bassi, and G. R. Fleming. "Solving structure in the CP29 light harvesting complex with polarization-phased 2D electronic spectroscopy", ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', 108, 3848–3853 (2011). *G. S. Schlau-Cohen, T. R. Calhoun, N. S. Ginsberg, M. Ballottari, R. Bassi, G. R. Fleming. "Spectroscopic Elucidation of Uncoupled Transition Energies in the Major Photosynthetic Light Harvesting Complex, LHCII", ''Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences'', 107, 13276 (2010). *T. R. Calhoun, N. S. Ginsberg, G. S. Schlau-Cohen, Y-C. Cheng, M. Ballottari, R. Bassi, and G. R. Fleming. "Quantum Coherence Enabled Determination of the Energy Landscape in Light Harvesting Complex II", ''Journal of Physical Chemistry B'', 113, 16291 (2009). (cover article) *G. S. Schlau-Cohen, T. R. Calhoun, N. S. Ginsberg, E. L. Read, M. Ballottari, R. Bassi, G. R. Fleming. "Mapping Pathways of Energy Flow in LHCII with Two-Dimensional Electronic Spectroscopy", ''Journal of Physical Chemistry B'', 113, 15352 (2009). * *N. S. Ginsberg, S. R. Garner, L. V. Hau. "Coherent control of optical information with matter wave dynamics", ''Nature'' 445, 623 (2007). – cover article; featured in ''New York Times'', National Public Radio, ''Nature'' video stream and podcast * *N. S. Ginsberg, J. Brand, L. V. Hau. "Observation of Hybrid Soliton Vortex-Ring Structures in Bose–Einstein Condensates", ''Physical Review Letters'' 94, 040403 (2005) – highlighted in American Institute of Physics' ''Physics News Update'', Physics Today's ''Physics Update'', and selected as one of 44 articles from 2005 to be highlighted in APS News, February 2006 * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Ginsberg, Naomi Shauna American chemical engineers American women chemists American women physicists American physicists Scientists from Nova Scotia People from Halifax, Nova Scotia University of Toronto alumni Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni UC Berkeley College of Chemistry faculty 21st-century American women scientists 1979 births Living people Canadian women chemists Canadian women physicists 21st-century Canadian women scientists Fellows of the American Physical Society 21st-century Canadian chemists 21st-century Canadian physicists