February 21, 2022
2022 John B. Fenn, Sr. Foundation Endowed Scholarship awarded to Behnam Moeini at Brigham Young University
Behnam says “I am pursuing my Ph.D. in surface analytical chemistry at Brigham Young University. I am tremendously happy to be selected as a 2022 recipient of the John B. Fenn, Sr. Foundation Endowed Scholarship. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for the generosity shown by making this endowment available to me. This award will propel me towards my goals in materials discovery and characterization in the vacuum coating area.”
Behnam’s research at BYU started by building a large-scale reactor for coating silica particles using chemical vapor deposition. His current project is on an understanding of the morphology/evolution of thin, porous silicon/silica films deposited by PVD, and developing a three-dimensional reconstruction framework of these films using a single two-dimensional image by machine learning techniques. Behnam says “Porous films are very important in many applications that include fuel cells, batteries, separation science, and sensor technologies. I am preparing these films and studying their morphology/evolution using XPS, spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE), FIB-SEM, and S/TEM image processing. I believe that a deeper understanding of thin, porous films will have a huge impact on various fields.”
