On Tuesday, September 20, the first ever Science Slam took place as a joint event between the Berkeley Lab Postdoc Association, the Advanced Light Source and the Molecular Foundry. The Science Slam format requires speakers to explain their research to an audience of non-experts. The speakers are limited to 3 minutes with a 1 slide maximum to entertain, engage and educate the audience on their own research. 
Participants on the day were postdocs from the Foundry and the ALS. The first slam was from Isvar Cordova who spoke about how resonant soft x-ray scattering uses nanoscale properties to understand macroscale phenomena in his talk “Resonant Bragg’ing in Operando: Spatio-Chemically Probing Nanostructures on a Macro Scale“. Following this another ALS postdoc, Antoine Wojdyla, spoke about how his instrument development at the ALS aims at “Making Small Microchips Smaller“.
Next a theorist from the Foundry, Jung-Hoon Lee discussed his “Computational Study of Nanoporous Materials” where supercomputers are used to understand and guide experiments in new material discovery. The last talk of the slam was from Ruimin Qiao, who told us about how device scaling is hampered by battery performance. Her talk “Shining Light on Battery Research” described how her work at the ALS targeted this problem.
A deliberating audience, including ALS director Roger Falcone
The winner of the slam will be invited to Uncharted, an event in Berkeley Oct 14-15th gathering a bunch of prestigious speakers, to perform her slam in front a a broad audience.