OAK RIDGE, Jan. 9, 2014 -- Hans M. Christen of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been named director of ORNL's Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers.
Christen joined ORNL in 2000 and led the Thin Films and Nanostructures group from 2006 to 2013. In 2013, he became associate director within the Materials Science and Technology Division and has managed the DOE Materials Sciences & Engineering Program since 2011.
His research has focused on the effects of epitaxial strain, spatial confinement, and interfacial mechanisms on the properties of complex-oxide thin films, in particular ferromagnetic, ferroelectric and multiferroic perovskites. He has authored over 150 scientific publications and several patents, is a fellow of the American Physical Society, and has served on a number of National Science Foundation and DOE review panels.
Christen, a west Knoxville resident, received a doctorate in physics from the Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1994 for research performed at the IBM Zurich Research Lab.
The materials synthesis and characterization were supported by the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at ORNL. CNMS is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers supported by the DOE Office of Science, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE's Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories. ORNL is managed by UT-Battelle for the Department of Energy's Office of Science.
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