2025 Weatherly Lecture – Professor Gianluigi Botton
Oct 17, 2025
2:30PM to 3:30PM
Date/Time
Date(s) - 17/10/2025
2:30 pm - 3:30 pm
Categories
The Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research presents:
The 2025 Weatherly Lecture featuring
Professor Gianluigi Botton
Chief Executive Officer, Diamond Light Source
Professor Botton will present a public lecture open to all:
From Electrons to Photons and From Plasmons to Phonons. What can we Learn from State-of-the-Art Characterization Techniques?
Friday, October 17, 2025 – 2:30-3:30 pm – ABB 102
Electron microscopes are very powerful tools to study the structure of materials at unprecedented spatial and energy resolution. These improvements are the result of the numerous efforts and foresight of the pioneers in electron optics, instrument developers, and risk takers that have led to new commercial tools. These new tools have increased the performance and information content that can be obtained from electron microscopes. While physicists, chemists and materials scientists benefit tremendously from these improvements, we need to be mindful of the fact that there are many other tools that provide complementary information and that there are limitations to all techniques. In this presentation, some recent examples of electron microscopy work related to quantum/battery materials and detection of plasmonic modes in complex noble metal structures will be shown. Then the focus will shift to complementary photon-based techniques that are available in synchrotrons. With energies ranging from sub-meV to over 100keV, there is a wealth of information that can be extracted from imaging, spectroscopy and scattering methods, from bonding environments of single atom catalysts, electronic structure of buried interfaces, and Fermi surfaces, to imaging of implants, spectroscopy in in-operando conditions and trace contaminants in plants and animal tissues. These examples highlight the benefits of considering multiple techniques when one needs to understand the structure and composition of a very broad range of materials.
Speaker Bio:
Gianluigi Botton received a degree in Engineering Physics and a PhD in Materials Engineering from Ecole Polytechnique of Montréal. He was Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 1998. He joined the Materials Technology Laboratory of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) in 1998 as a research scientist. In 2001 he moved to the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at McMaster University where he held a Tier 2 and then 1 Canada Research Chair in Electron Microscopy of Nanoscale Materials (2002 to 2023). He received the Metal Physics Medal of the Canadian Materials Science Conference (2017), the Lee Hsun Research Award from the Institute Metals Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2017), the Microbeam Analysis Society Presidential Award (2020), DKC MacDonald Honorary Lecture of the Canadian Materials Science Conference (2023) of the CIM and he is Fellow of the Microscopy Society of America and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Prof. Botton established the Canadian Centre for Electron Microscopy-CCEM, a national facility for ultrahigh-resolution microscopy, and was its director for over 11 years. In May 2019, he became the Science Director at the Canadian Light Source, Canada’s synchrotron while continuing to hold is academic appointment and his research at McMaster University. He has been Guest editor of special issues of microscopy and electrochemistry journals, and he is on the Editorial Board of the Elsevier Journals Micron and Materials Today Nano. He was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of the Diamond Light Source, UK’s national synchrotron facility, in October 2023. With more than 350 peer-reviewed publications, 42,000 citations he trained over 50 highly qualified personnel in his group.
About the Weatherly Lectureship:
The Weatherly Lectureship, established in honour of the late George C. Weatherly, pays tribute to his vision, leadership, and lasting impact as Director of the Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research from 1996-2001. It will bring distinguished researchers in materials science to McMaster to present on cutting-edge research that reflects Weatherly’s dedication to innovation, collaboration, and excellence. The inaugural lecture, delivered by Prof. Gianluigi Botton, CEO of Diamond Light Source, marks a fitting beginning to this celebration of scientific achievement.
.