Jinghua Guo, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), an adjunct professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society, is being honored with the Materials Research Society (MRS) Innovation in Materials Characterization Award “for pioneering in situ/operando soft x-ray spectroscopy characterization of interfacial phenomena in energy, catalysis and chemical materials science.”

Guo’s research focuses on soft x-ray spectroscopy (XAS, XES, and RIXS) of materials and the study of energy conversion, energy storage, and catalytic processes. He has built in situ/operando cells for the soft x-ray spectroscopy study of catalytic and electrochemical solid/gas and solid/liquid interfaces in realistic reaction conditions.

Soft x-ray spectroscopy offers electronic structure characterization of materials in energy conversion, energy storage, and catalysis regarding functionality, complexity of material architecture, and chemical interactions. His work has shown the power of in situ/operando soft x-ray spectroscopy characterization techniques of interfacial phenomena revealing the mechanism of charge transfer and chemical transformation of solid/gas and solid/liquid interfaces of energy storage and catalytic materials in a realistic environment.

Guo received a BSc degree in optical engineering from Zhejiang University, China, a MS degree in physics from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a PhD degree in physics from Uppsala University, Sweden. He continued as a postdoc at Uppsala University, and then as a junior faculty member in the Physics Department. He then moved to the Advanced Light Source facility at LBNL in 2001, and is currently a senior scientist and Photon Science Operation RIXS Program Lead. The award is endowed by Gwo-Ching Wang and Toh-Ming Lu.