Two Argonne scientists receive 2025 DOE Early Career Research Awards
Newswise — Two researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have been named recipients of 2025 Early Career Research Program awards from the DOE Office of Science. David Kaphan and Yong Zhao will each receive $550,000 per year for five years to further their research.
This DOE Office of Science program seeks to strengthen the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to outstanding researchers early in their careers, when many scientists make formative contributions. Awardees were selected from a large pool of applicants from universities and national labs based on peer review by scientific experts.
David Kaphan is a chemist in Argonne’s Chemical Sciences and Engineering division. His research focuses on designing a new generation of catalysts — materials that speed up chemical reactions — for chemical transformations to overcome key kinetic limitations of today’s catalysts. His project aims to explore the potential of electric field-responsive oxides, such as ferroelectrics, to actively control the surface-level electronic characteristics of catalytic active sites. This approach could enable the development of catalysts that adapt during chemical transformations, optimizing reactivity for different phases of chemical synthesis processes.
Kaphan’s project will study the complex role that external electric fields can play in the modulation of electronic surface properties during catalytic processes. He will use X-ray absorption spectroscopy techniques and other methods at the Advanced Photon Source and the Center for Nanoscale Materials — both DOE Office of Science user facilities at Argonne — to measure properties such as field responsive surface electron density and catalytic reactivity. Additionally, the project will integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the exploration of reaction parameters and electric field conditions. This work has the potential to revolutionize catalyst design for critical processes such as selective methane oxidation and ammonia synthesis.
“Stimulus-responsive, nonequilibrium catalysis represents an exciting opportunity to overcome the classical limitations of static processes and increase efficiency in chemical transformations,” said Kaphan. “This support will allow us to explore new frontiers in field-responsive dynamic catalyst design and develop new solutions to address key challenges in energy-related chemistry.”
Yong Zhao is an assistant physicist in the Physics division. His research seeks to address one of the most fundamental questions in nuclear physics: understanding the internal structure of protons and neutrons. These are key objectives of multidimensional proton imaging efforts at DOE’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and the forthcoming Electron-Ion Collider at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Both protons and neutrons consist of different combinations of quarks and gluons. Zhao plans to develop a new theoretical approach and use lattice quantum chromodynamics (QCD) for precise calculations of the underlying multidimensional quark and gluon structures. This approach will enable high-precision imaging of the proton, as well as reveal the contributions of quark and gluon spin and orbital angular momentum to the proton’s spin.
Using the Aurora and Polaris supercomputers at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility, Zhao’s project aims to reduce systematic uncertainties and improve numerical precision in proton and neutron structural studies. Its insights will provide crucial theoretical guidance for experiments at Jefferson Lab, Brookhaven and other facilities.
“This award is a tremendous opportunity to push the boundaries of our understanding of the strong force and the fundamental building blocks of matter,” said Zhao. “I am grateful for the support that will allow us to make significant strides in this area of research.”
“David and Yong exemplify the innovative spirit and scientific excellence that are hallmarks of Argonne’s research community,” said Kawtar Hafidi, associate laboratory director for Argonne’s Physical Sciences and Engineering directorate. “Their groundbreaking work has the potential to transform our understanding of fundamental processes in physics and address key challenges in research and development. I look forward to seeing the impact of their efforts in the years to come.”
About Argonne’s Center for Nanoscale Materials
The Center for Nanoscale Materials is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale supported by the DOE Office of Science. 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, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit https://science.osti.gov/User-Facilities/User-Facilities-at-a-Glance.
The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility provides supercomputing capabilities to the scientific and engineering community to advance fundamental discovery and understanding in a broad range of disciplines. Supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, the ALCF is one of two DOE Leadership Computing Facilities in the nation dedicated to open science.
About the Advanced Photon Source
The U. S. Department of Energy Office of Science’s Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the world’s most productive X-ray light source facilities. The APS provides high-brightness X-ray beams to a diverse community of researchers in materials science, chemistry, condensed matter physics, the life and environmental sciences, and applied research. These X-rays are ideally suited for explorations of materials and biological structures; elemental distribution; chemical, magnetic, electronic states; and a wide range of technologically important engineering systems from batteries to fuel injector sprays, all of which are the foundations of our nation’s economic, technological, and physical well-being. Each year, more than 5,000 researchers use the APS to produce over 2,000 publications detailing impactful discoveries, and solve more vital biological protein structures than users of any other X-ray light source research facility. APS scientists and engineers innovate technology that is at the heart of advancing accelerator and light-source operations. This includes the insertion devices that produce extreme-brightness X-rays prized by researchers, lenses that focus the X-rays down to a few nanometers, instrumentation that maximizes the way the X-rays interact with samples being studied, and software that gathers and manages the massive quantity of data resulting from discovery research at the APS.
This research used resources of the Advanced Photon Source, a U.S. DOE Office of Science User Facility operated for the DOE Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science.