Dr. Matthias Zeller (Purdue University)
Dr. Zeller received his PhD at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, where he conducted research on the organometallic chemistry of phosphorous(III) compounds. After a postdoctoral visit at MIT he then joined Youngstown State University, YSU, in Northeast Ohio, first as a postdoctoral fellow, and later as adjunct faculty and YSU’s service crystallographer.
He is now leads the X-ray Diffraction Laboratory in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. When not in the lab collecting data on crystals from all over the world or helping students to make their sample work he likes the outdoors, hiking, or building the trails if they are not there yet.
Dr. Christos Malliakas (Northwestern University)
Dr. Christos Malliakas received his B.S. in Chemistry and M.S. in Solid State Physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. Christos received his Ph.D. at Michigan State University under the direction of Professor Mercouri Kanatzidis. He completed his post-doctoral work in the Emerging Materials group at the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory under John Mitchell’s leadership.
Christos joined the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center (IMSERC) facility at Northwestern in January 2016 as an X-Ray Crystallography specialists, and now also serves as Research Associate Professor. He has extensive experience in non-classical crystallographic techniques such as incommensurate modulated structure and total scattering diffraction methods.
Charlotte Stern (Northwestern University)
Charlotte Stern has operated the IMSERC x-ray crystallographic facility since May 1990. This includes consulting and performing data collection and full structural analysis on crystals for university faculty and outside academic and industrial clients. She maintains and trouble shoots the x-ray diffractometer, and associated computer software packages. She teaches a graduate level course in x-ray crystallography, including laboratory instruction (Chem 435). She trains and supervises students in crystallographic analysis. Charlotte received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign, Il in 1985. She worked as an assistant research chemist at the University of Illinois from 1986-1990.
Dr. Allen Oliver (University of Notre Dame)
Dr. Allen G. Oliver is the departmental crystallographer for the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at the University of Notre Dame. He has 25 years of experience as a professional crystallographer. Beyond the daily operations of an X-ray facility, he also teaches a course in Chemical Crystallography at Notre Dame and has served as a co-host, organizer and instructor at the ACA Summer Course since 2011.
Nathaniel M. Barker – Northwestern University
Nathaniel (Nate) Barker attended Wheeling Jesuit University where he obtained a B.S. in Chemistry. His studies then took him to the University of Cincinnati working under Dr. William Connick and Dr. Peng Zhang. He focused on developing and characterizing Platinum-based vapochromic sensors and investigating polymorphic platinum salts via X-ray Crystallography. During his studies, he worked closely with Dr. Jeanette Krause, the director X-ray facility at the Richard C. Elder X-ray Crystallography facility located at the University of Cincinnati, and Dr. Allen Oliver director of the Molecular Structure Facility at the University of Notre Dame.
After completion of his Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry (2021), he started his current position at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral fellow at the Integrated Molecular Structure Education and Research Center (IMSERC). At IMSERC he assists in daily operations, specialty experiments, and training of users for X-ray diffraction experiments, as well as thermal analysis, X-ray fluorescence, polarimetry, and FT-IR experiments.
