Naomi Ginsberg
- 2 min read
- 3 chapters
Related on Lably
Through Absolute zero, Micrometre and Photosynthesis
Life and education
Ginsberg was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She earned her B.Sc. in engineering at the University of Toronto in 2000, and completed her PhD in physics at Harvard.
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, Ginsberg studied Bose–Einstein condensates, ultracold clouds of atoms that exist at temperatures just a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero.
After being awarded her PhD for her thesis entitled "Manipulations with spatially compressed slow light pulses in Bose–Einstein condensates" with Lene Hau 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 as her advisor. She held a Glenn T. Seaborg Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, until her appointment as an assistant professor in the chemistry department at UC Berkeley in 2010.
Sign in to keep reading
2 more chapters are free with a Lably account.
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 away. The American Institute of Physics 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 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, light microscopy, and cathodoluminescence electron microscopy.
Awards
In 2011, Ginsberg was awarded the David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
In 2012, Her research attracted support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA 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.
In 2021, Ginsberg was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society (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".