Stach Group
A materials science group at Penn Engineering building the instruments and experiments that let us watch materials work in their native environments.
We develop and apply electron microscopy and synchrotron X-ray techniques to the materials questions driving the energy transition — catalysis, energy storage, solar photovoltaics, wide-bandgap devices, and the nanostructures underneath them. Our work sits at the intersection of new instrumentation, real operating environments, and the specific mechanisms that link structure and function.
A lot of what we build is community infrastructure. Gas- and liquid-cell holders, synchrotron-compatible microreactors, 4D-STEM pipelines, and the reconstruction code that turns raw data into a mechanism. Whenever we can, those tools — holders, notebooks, pipelines — go out with the papers.
The group is housed in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. Day-to-day, we work across two facilities at Penn: the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter (LRSM), a multidisciplinary MRSEC focused on soft and hard materials, and the Singh Center for Nanotechnology, Penn's shared nanofabrication and characterization user facility.
Almost every project in the group runs with a partner — a catalysis group, a device group, a theory group, an energy storage group, or a national lab. We are active at Brookhaven's CFN and NSLS-II, Oak Ridge National Lab's CNMS, Argonne's CNM, and the National Center for Electron Microscopy at Berkeley. We are also part of large research efforts, including the Laboratory for Research on the Structure of Matter, NSF-Sponsored Materials Science and Engineering Center, the Center for Single Entity, Nanochemistry and Nano-Crystal Design, an NSF-sponsored Chemical Center for Innovation, and the Center for Hybrid Approaches in Solar Energies to Liquid Fuels, sponsored by the Department of Energy.
We take prospective Ph.D. students through Penn's MSE and ESE graduate programs; if you are applying, mention an interest in in situ or operando microscopy in your statement, and feel free to email Eric directly. Postdoctoral inquiries are welcome at any time — please send a CV, a short research statement, and two references. Penn undergraduates interested in microscopy or image analysis should reach out about semester- and summer-projects; we occasionally have room for undergraduate researchers on our projects. We do not accept high schoolstudents