Jianwei (John) Miao

Jianwei (John) Miao is a professor of physics and astronomy at UCLA. In 1999, he performed the seminal experiment of extending X-ray crystallography to allow structural determination of non-crystalline specimens, which is known as coherent diffractive imaging (CDI), lensless, or computational microscopy. CDI methods such as ptychography and Bragg CDI have been broadly implemented using synchrotron radiation, X-ray free electron lasers, high harmonic generation, optical lasers, and electrons. Another important field that Miao has pioneered is atomic electron tomography (AET). In 2012, he led a team that first demonstrated AET at 2.4 Å resolution without assuming crystallinity or averaging. He and collaborators have since performed several groundbreaking AET experiments and recently developed 4D AET to observe crystal nucleation at atomic resolution, showing early stage nucleation results not consistent with classical nucleation theory.