NPC Lab Team
Adam Z. Stieg, Ph.D.
Associate Director, CNSI Technology Centers; Director, NPC
Dr. Stieg is a Research Scientist and Associate Director of CNSI responsible for oversight of the Institute’s six Technology Centers – a collection of open-access user facilities that foster innovation across disciplines, facilitate university collaborations with industry, and aid in the rapid commercialization of discoveries by supporting researchers from academia and industry. He earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Drew University and Ph.D. in Inorganic/Physical Chemistry from UCLA. Dr. Stieg’s research seeks to bridge the gap between our fundamental understanding of nanomaterials and how these systems tend toward complexity at mesoscopic scales. By applying high-performance scanning probe microscopes and real-time, multichannel measurement systems to the rational design of functional nanosystems and architectures, Dr. Stieg strives to address modern challenges renewable energy, developmental biology, and unconventional computing.
Chong Hyun “Paul” Chang, Ph.D.
Technical Director, NPC
Chong Hyun “Paul” Chang has taken a new role at the California NanoSystems Institute as the Technical Director of the Nano and Pico Characterization Laboratory (NPC). Chang has a Ph.D. in chemical and environmental engineering from UC Riverside. Most recently he worked for the past 10 years at CEIN in the CNSI as a nanomaterial core manager and the technical director of ICP-MS core facility. In his role at the NPC Chang will oversee technical support and training.
NPC Advisory Committee
Advisory Committees are comprised of experts in their respective fields tasked with providing insight and perspective into new trends, emerging technologies and strategic partnerships that will foster discovery and innovation in the full breadth of application areas relevant to each Technology Center.
James K. Gimzewski, Ph.D.
Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA.
Committee Chair – He received his B.S. degree in 1974 and his Ph.D. in 1977 at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University Corvallis and the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Zürich from 1977-1983, he joined IBM Research Lab in Zürich as a project leader where he pioneered research on mechanical and electrical contacts with single atoms and molecules using scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). He joined the UCLA faculty in 2001.
Manish Butte, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the Department of Pediatrics, and Division Chief of Immunology, Allergy, and Rheumatology at UCLA
Committee member – Manish earned his B.Sc. with honors in Physics at Brown University in 1993. He earned his M.D. degree from the Brown University School of Medicine in 1996 and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from UCSF in 2000. He completed his residency at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 2003 and a clinical fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2006, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and in the Harvard Chemistry & Chemical Biology Department. He joined the UCLA faculty in 2017.
Dino Di Carlo, Ph.D.
Professor in the Department of Bioengineering and Biomedical Engineering at UCLA
Committee Member– Dino Di Carlo received his B.S. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 2002 and received a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 2006. He then conducted postdoctoral studies from 2006-2008 at the Center for Engineering in Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. He joined the UCLA faculty in 2008.
Andrea Kasko, Ph.D.
Associate Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at UCLA
Andrea graduated from the University of Michigan with a B.S. in Chemistry. In 1999, she obtained a M.S.E. in Macromolecular Science Engineering from Case Western Reserve University, and in 2004 she obtained a PhD in Polymer Science at the University of Akron. After two years of post-doctoral research sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Andrea joined the UCLA faculty in 2006.
Jeffrey Zink, Ph.D.
Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA
He received his B.S. degree in Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. He came to UCLA after receiving his PhD degree from the University of Illinois. He is a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and has been an invited guest professor at the University of Paris VI and at the University of Amsterdam, He is an authority on triboluminescence, photochemistry and photophysics of metal-containing molecules, and on nanomachines, and has published almost 400 articles.
Previous Members
Shivani Sharma – Dr. Sharma is an Assistant Researcher at UCLA whose primary area of expertise is nanomedicine, structural biology and biomarker development. She was a Senior Fellow at University of Washington, Seattle and Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, after obtaining her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India. Dr. Sharma’s current research includes developing novel cell and tissue mechanics based biomarkers for cancer detection and chemosensitivity assays; high-resolution structural and mechanical mapping of exosomes, bio-molecules; and single molecule force spectroscopy for diagnostic and drug delivery applications.
Jason Reed – Dr. Reed is an Assistant Professor in the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Physics, and is an expert in nanotechnology, and related approaches, applied to biology and medicine. Dr. Reed was a member of the pioneer class of the Cold Spring Harbor Labs course on Singe Cell Analysis in 2012. His current research is focused around bio-mechanical systems, microfabrication and surface metrology for biological material characterization: